A poetry brainstorming session, featuring a spectrum of poets with diverse social and cultural backgrounds, sharing and enhancing our community’s poetic canvas. Over the years, this poetry series has been presented at the Gelman Library of George Washington University and the Arts Club of Washington. This year we are honored to present our event at The Writer’s Center after a period of unwanted shutdown due to the pandemic. Additionally, we would like to take this moment to salute Grace Cavalieri’s 90th joyful year with us! Reception follows.
Free and open to the public, limited space, registration required below. Please view and agree to [link id=’2132036′ text=’The Writer’s Center COVID Policy’] before attending our live events.
Grace Cavalieri is Maryland’s State Poet Laureate. She’s the author of numerous books of poetry and produced plays. Grace founded, and still produces, “The Poet and the Poem” on podcast and radio, celebrating 45 years on- air in 2022. The series is produced at the Library of Congress, free to all public radio. Fifty paintings by Cavalieri are owned by collectors throughout the country. Washington Writers’ Publishing House just reprinted her original WHY I CANNOT TAKE A LOVER (2022.). Her new book is THE LONG GAME: Poems Selected and New (The Word Works.)
Chan Wing-chi, a Washingtonian poet cum musician, has been committing himself as an arts practitioner for the global communities. Currently Chan has been serving as professor for the arts at the Beijing Capital Normal University; recently he was invited to lecture at the Yale University as a visiting scholar by its East Asian Council. During his tenure as Development Director for the Washington, DC Youth Symphony Orchestra, he had raised multi–millions of funds to operate the Orchestra’s international tours to Europe and Asia. His artistic advisory spectrum has been crossing over the ocean, including serving as consultants for US National Endowment for the Arts, New Jersey and South Carolina Arts Commissions, D.C. Mayor’s Office, external examiner for a Master’s program at New York University, China National Symphony Orchestra, to name a few. For the past ten years, Chan has been spearheading to score his mind of conceptual art, minimalism and pointillism music with synchronization profile and tonal rhyming perception in composing English poetry; he was featured at the Poet & Poetry Program of the Library of Congress and his poetry anthologies Mass For Nanking’s 1937 and A Pathetique Sonata had been published by the New Academia Publishing in 2015 and 2021 respectively.
Jim Beall is an astrophysicist, a poet, and an author on issues related to public policy and national defense. Formerly, he was a Congressional Science Fellow and an employee at the Office of Technology Assessment for the United States Congress from 1978 to 1979. He is a member of the faculty at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, a senior consultant to the Space Sciences Division at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and was an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Physics and Astronomy the College of Science at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His work has been featured on Grace Cavalieri’s “Poet and the Poem” program at the Library of Congress. He was a participant in the Poets-in-the-Schools program in Virginia, 1975 – 1980, and has published in the Hollins Critic and the St. John’s Review, among others. His first book, Hickey, the Days, was published by The Word Works, Inc., Washington, DC 1981. His second book, Republic, was published by Toad Hall Press in 2010. The Italian translation of Republic was published in 2013. His third book, Onyx Moon, was published by New Academia Press, and was awarded the 2018 William Meredith Foundation Award for Poetry.
Eric Baker is a Korean American poet hailing from New York City. He is currently working on his MFA in Poetry at the University of Maryland- College Park, and is a graduate of St. John’s College in Annapolis. His work explores Han, the Korean concept of generational grief.
Alan King is a Caribbean American whose parents emigrated from Trinidad and Tobago to the U.S. in the 1970s. He’s a husband, father, and communications professional who blogs about art and social issues at alanwking.com. He’s the author of Crooked Smiling Light (Plan B Press, 2021), POINT BLANK (Silver Birch Press, 2016), and DRIFT (Willow Books, 2012). A Cave Canem graduate fellow, he holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program. Alan lives with his family in Bowie, MD.
Cymn, Lai-Fong Wong 黃千芳 is an art critic, writer, poet, art educator, aesthete and mixed media artist. Publishing in the areas of art, art criticism and poetry, Wong also exhibited her art works widely across the East to the West; Lai Fong served as a lecturer at the Hong Kong Education University; she had been working as a Consultant for Arts Education/Curriculum Development at the Education Bureau of Hong Kong, and as the Art Curator for The Airport Authority Hong Kong. Having been named Chosen Artists for Winning Entry at the Contemporary Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibitions, 1994, 1996, 1998, and honored with the Ideco International Painting Award in Spain (the Grand Prize) in 1997, Wong has extensive publications on poetry and art, including The Water Melon’s Mind -Dialogue between Paintings and Poems Form 1997-2003: Travelogue of Time – Napped in The Episode (2003) and Travelogue of Time – Hong Kong 7 Macau 10 (2003), Poetic seeing: Implementing curriculum reform through the development of multimedia, London: Kogan Page (2001), Poetic Visions of Water & Soil Mutuality (1996); Wong’ s poetry anthology FIRE ON THE ZEN has recently been published by the New Academia Publishing in Washington.
Ellen Wise’s poems have appeared in Nimrod, Quercus Review, Beltway Quarterly, Delmarva Review and in the poetry anthologies, The Road Beneath our Feet and Poet Trees: Poetry Hiding in Plain Sight. Her awards include Bread Loaf’s Donald Everett Axinn Contributor Scholarship in Poetry, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellowship and a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Poetry. Five of her poems are set as the song-cycle, Ventriloquist Acts of God, by noted composer Adolphus Hailstork. She lives on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with her boatbuilder husband Fred.
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