Join us for the Eastern Shore Voices annual poetry reading LIVE and IN-PERSON at Salisbury University. This year, we know you will enjoy readings from Linda Blaskey, Joan Drescher Cooper, Beth Dulin, Jane C. Miller, Meg Ozman, Pat Valdata and Cesca Janece Waterfield as well as Fenix Youth Project’s Amber Green, Salisbury Poet Laureate, Nancy Mitchell, and 2022 Salisbury Poet-in-Residence, Teri Ellen Cross Davis!
Attending LIVE? The event will take place at Salisbury University's Conway Hall 179 (look for the Harriet Tubman statue). Parking: Use the lot to the left of the Teaching Education building off of Route 13.
This Poetry Reading will also be live streamed via Zoom. Register for this event to receive the Zoom link 24 hours in advance.
This reading is free and open to the public due to generous grants from The Community Foundation of the Eastern Shore as well as support from Wicomico County Public Libraries, Eastern Shore Writers Association, Maryland Writers Association, and The City of Salisbury, Maryland. This event is brought to you through the generosity of Salisbury University's Fulton School of Liberal Arts!
Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, (winner of the 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, Mad Creek Books) and Haint, (winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry, Gival Press, 2016). She was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award and is the recipient of grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and The Freya Project. A member of the Black Ladies Brunch Collective, she has been awarded fellowships and scholarships to Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Community of Writers Poetry Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in print, online, and in many journals and anthologies including: Academy of American Poets, Deep Beauty; Not Without Our Laughter; Harvard Review, PANK, Poetry Ireland Review, and Kenyon Review. She was the 2019-2020 HoCoPoLitSo Writer-in-Residence for Howard County, Maryland, and is the current Poetry Coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. She lives in Maryland with her husband, poet Hayes Davis and their two children.
Nancy Mitchell is the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of Salisbury, MD, and a 2012 Pushcart Prize winner. She is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Near Surround, Grief Hut and The Out-of-Body Shop and co-editor of Plume Interviews 1. She was a 2019 guest on The Poet and The Poem broadcast from the Library of Congress. Her poems have appeared in Agni, Green Mountains Review, Poetry Daily, Washington Square Review and other journals and have been anthologized in Last Call (Sarabande Books) The Working Poet (Autumn House Press) and Plume 3, 4, 5,6 and 7. She has received artist-in- residency fellowships at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in San Angelo, Virginia and in Auvillar, France, and at the Shotpouch Creek in Oregon. Formerly a professor of Creative Writing at Salisbury University, Maryland and producer of the annual literary/fine arts festival WORDSTOCK, Mitchell taught in the Maryland Summer Center for the Arts. Mitchell is a book discussion facilitator, and teaches poetry workshops in the Worcester County Library System. She serves as Associate Editor of Special Features for Plume Poetry. For more information about Nancy Mitchell, visit: https://www.nancymitchellwriter.com
Amber Green Dedicated to empowering our county's future leaders and marginalized groups, Amber has served as a Youth Development Specialist for her local city government, sits on both the Youth Development Advisory Committee and Human Rights Advisory Committee, a member of the Wicomico NAACP and Caucus for African American Leaders Caucus Eastern Shore Chapter and the founder Fenix Youth Project Inc., a creative arts youth development 501(c)3 non-profit organization focused on empowering youth to make social change while using art as a tool.
Amber studied English literature with a concentration in communications at the Historically Black University, The University of Maryland Eastern Shore. It was there she fell in love with digital media storytelling. Her passion for the community proved to be an asset as she took her skills in video production, web design, social media management, and research to enhance her ability to become an advocate for juvenile justice and other social justice issues.
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Linda Blaskey is the recipient of three Fellowship Grants in Literature:Poetry from Delaware Division of the Arts, including the 2022 Master's. She is Editor of Quartet, an online poetry journal; coordinator for the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize; poetry/interview editor emerita for Broadkill Review. She is the author of four poetry collections, two of which are collaborations, one forthcoming in April, 2022. Her work is included in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets.
Poet Joan Drescher Cooper is a veteran public school teacher in Baltimore but has deep roots in Wicomico and Worcester Counties as a writer and patron of the arts. She published a poetry collection, Birds Like Me, in 2019 through Finishing Line Press and has had other works published in The Delmarva Review, The Bay to Ocean Anthology, The Write Launch, and others.
Beth Dulin lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She is a graduate of The New School’s Eugene Lang College. Her poems have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Atlanta Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Yes, Poetry, among others, and are forthcoming in Gargoyle. Her poetry has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author and co-creator of Truce, a limited edition artists’ book, in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Visit her online: https://www.bethdulin.com/
Jane C. Miller’s poetry has appeared in Kestrel, Colorado Review and Summerset Review, among others. Miller is co-author of the poetry collection, Walking the Sunken Boards (Pond Road Press, 2019) and an editor of the online poetry journal, Quartet
(www.quartetjournal.com). She lives in Delaware.
Meg Ozman has lived on the Eastern Shore her entire life. A graduate of Salisbury University (BA ’04, M.Ed. ’13), she has been a teacher with Caroline County Public Schools for 14 years and is a freelance writer for Shore Home and Garden magazine. She resides in Trappe with her husband, two children, three dogs, two barn cats, and a slew of chickens.
Pat Valdata is a poet and novelist. Her poetry book about women aviation pioneers, Where No Man Can Touch, won the 2015 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared recently in Ekphrastic Review, Italian Americana, and Passager. Her third novel, Eve’s Daughters (Moonshine Cove, 2020), won first prize from the Delaware Press Association and received Honorable Mention from the National Federation of Press Women. For more information about Pat, go to www.patvaldata.com.
Cesca Janece Waterfield grew up in coastal Virginia, and graduated from McNeese State University with an MFA in Creative Writing. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Other Stories, Writers Resist, Scalawag Magazine, RVA Magazine, and other publications. She is the author of Conspiracy Cherry (Ludic Arts); The Oyster Garden (Selene Pressworks); and Bartab (Two Handed Engine Press). She received the 2017 Editor’s Prize in Fiction from MARY: A Journal of New Writing, judged by Natalie Baszile.
