Grace Cavalieri Receives an ANNIE Award for Literary Arts
MD Poet Laureate Grace Cavalieri just recieved an ANNIE award for her contributions to literary arts. It adds to a long list of literary accomplishments.
At 87 years old, poet Grace Cavalieri shows scant signs of slowing down. Yesterday, on a rainy coastal night in Annapolis, Maryland, Grace was presented with a 2019 ANNIE award for her immense contributions to the literary arts in Anne Arundel County. WYPR's Andy Bienstock presided over the ceremony and announced the ANNIE award as yet one more in a very, very, long list of achievements for the poet, many of them quite recent.
An Abridged List:
Grace Cavalieri received the 2013 George Garrett Award, the Pen-Fiction Award, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Silver Medal, and awards from the National Commission on Working Women, the WV Commission on Women, and the American Association of University Women. She was awarded the DC Poet Laureate Award from Dolores Kendrick and the Paterson lifetime Achievement Award. She won a Paterson Excellence Award for What I Would do for Love, and The Bordighera Poetry Prize for Water on the Sun. She received the inaugural Columbia Merit Award for "significant contributions to poetry" and The Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from Washington Independent Review of Books. She has been honored with the Dragonfly Press Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement,The DC Public Humanities Award, and The West Virginia Women in Arts Award. And finally, the 2019 ANNIE in Literary Arts.
More Grace News
Grace's play "Quilting the Sun" recently opened to rave reviews, with Broadway World saying of the play that "While [Harriet] Powers' quilt is archived in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, its legacy lives on in QUILTING THE SUN."
Grace's duties as Maryland Poet Laureate take her all over the state of Maryland as an ambassador for the literary arts and arts learning. Recently, in a speaking engagement at Anne Arundel Community College, she told students that "Writers are the ones who save the things that are important and … it’s our job to talk about the hard things like love and grief."
And her long running NPR series which broadcasts great interviews with the world's most important poets, "The Poet and The Poem" brings the work of the Poet Laureate to homes around the country every other week.
On November 10th Grace will be back at St. John's College in Annapolis, MD for a unique performance event which pairs poets and musicians in staggered performances.
Grace's Legacy Book, Other Voices, Other Lives is a selection of poems, plays, and interviews drawn from over forty years of work by one of America’s most beloved and influential women of letters. It is, as always, available in the ASP store and wherever exquisite books are sold.
This book represents a lifetime achievement in the literary arts. Grace Cavalieri has the Midas touch and every genre she touches turns to gold. And as the very last line of the book says, ‘love is the bed of gold we lie on.’
–Richard Harteis, President of The William Meredith Foundation
Cavalieri’s contributions to American letters cannot be understated, and this collection showcases the eye and the ear of a poet and playwright, as well as her role of provocateur and reviewer with the Library of Congress.
–Stephen Scott Whittaker, Literary Review Editor for Broadkill Review
The poet Grace Cavalieri is a…truly generous friend of poetry and poets. In her writing and all she does her large-minded generosity shines.
–Robert Pinsky, US Poet Laureate 1995