KEYNOTE TALK (11am - 12 noon )
By GRACE CAVALIERI

Writing For My Life

This talk will explore Grace’s personal belief in writing as a life force, in the value of poetry and in energy as the conduit for creating. Grace will expand this to several ways of expression  — the value of the narrative, and of the formal, the persona, and the monologue. The second half of the talk will be interactive, soliciting listeners’ questions, and thoughts about anything connected to poetry; motivation, writing, distributing, etc.

LUNCH (12 NOON - 1PM)

Lunch is included in the registration price this year. Use your lunchtime to hang out with friends, catch up on writing, reflect on the morning activities, chat to poets and buy their books, and browse books from The Ivy Bookshop.

AFTERNOON WORKSHOPS (1PM - 3PM)

Our afternoon workshops will be led by local poets Shirley J. Brewer, Michael Fallon, Matt Hohner and Jennifer Keith. Workshop descriptions are listed below. Participants will chose and sign up for their choice of workshop during registration. Workshop preferences will be requested during registration but spots are limited and will be assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. Everyone will be able to attend a workshop, but it may not be their first choice so please register early to secure your first choice.

GET TO KNOW THIS YEAR’S GUEST SPEAKER AND OUR WORKSHOP POETS:

Grace Cavalieri was Maryland’s Tenth Poet Laureate. She’s the author of several books and plays. Her latest poetry books are: Fables From Italy (2025;) The Third Voice (2025;) The Long Game: Poems Selected& New (2023;) Owning The Not So Distant World (2024;) and I Haiku Too (2023.)   “Anna Nicole: Blonde Glory,” and “Quilting the Sun” were the latest plays mounted in NYC. She founded, produces and hosts “The Poet and the Poem,” for public radio, 49 years on-air. Grace holds the AWP’s George Garrett Award, two Allen Ginsberg Awards, the Pen-Fiction Award and The CPB Silver Medal among other honors.

Shirley J. Brewer serves as resident poet at Carver Center for the Arts, and on the board of Passager Books. Her award-winning poems garnish Barrow Street, Gargoyle, Loch Raven Review, Poetry East, Tar River Poetry, among other journals and anthologies. Shirley’s poem, “My Movie Monsters,” won 3RD Prize in the Beullah Rose Poetry Contest, 2025, sponsored by Smartish Pace. Her fifth book of poetry, Goddess of Swizzle, is forthcoming from Apprentice House in Spring, 2026. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Shirley was interviewed in January, 2020 by Maryland poet laureate, Grace Cavalieri, for her long-running series “The Poet and the Poem” at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where her poems are now archived and, thanks to the Lunar Codex program, are currently on the moon!! Visit her website.

Michael Fallon is Senior Lecturer Emeritus in English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he taught expository writing, creative writing, and literature for 35 years. He has been President of the Maryland State Poetry and Literary Society and an editor of Puerto del Sol and was the founding editor of The Maryland Poetry Review. Poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, The Connecticut River Review, The Loch Raven Review, Illuminations, Southword, Slipstream, The Bangalore Review, and many other publications. Fallon is the winner of two Fellowships in Poetry from the Maryland State arts Council in 1988 and in 2009 and is the author of 5 published collections of poetry, A History of the Color Black, Dolphin-Moon Press, 1991; Since You Have No Body, winner of the Plan B Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, 2011; The Great Before and After, BrickHouse Books, 2011, and the self-published, Empire of Leaves, Singing Man Press, 2018. Fallon’s poems have been frequently recorded on CDs and broadcast on Public Radio. His recent poetry chapbook, Leaf Notes: Poems of the Plague Years, was published by Writer’s Relief, and won the 2021 Water Sedge Poetry Prize. To sample his work, read reviews, blogs and more, visit his website.

Matt Hohner has won or placed in numerous national and international poetry competitions, including wins in the Doolin International Poetry Prize in Ireland, the Oberon Magazine Poetry Prize, and the Maryland Writers’ Association Prize. His publications include Rattle: Poets Respond, Sky Island Journal, The Cardiff Review, The Storms Journal, New Contrast, Live Canon, and Prairie Schooner. An editor with Loch Raven Review, Hohner’s first collection Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House) was published in 2018. His second collection, At The Edge Of A Thousand Years, won the 2023 Jacar Press Full-length Book Prize, selected by poet Carolyn Forché, and was published in 2024.

Jennifer Keith’s poems have appeared in Sewanee Theological Review, The Nebraska Review, The Free State Review, Fledgling Rag, Unsplendid, Best American Poetry 2015, JMWW, and elsewhere. Keith received the 2014 John Elsberg poetry prize and was a finalist in the 2021 Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. Her first full-length book of poems, Terminarch, was chosen by David Yezzi for the 2023 Able Muse Book Award.

photos FROM PREVIOUS Poetry DayS:

Photo credit to Zoe Leonard and Mel Edden

QUESTIONS ABOUT POETRY DAY?