Chezia Thompson Cager

Chezia Thompson Cager is the winner of the 1999 and 2001 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Poetry. The Mid-Atlantic poetry journal Poet Lore says of her first book, "Reading The Presence of Things Unseen: Giant Talk is like being guided through the urban and political landscape of the last twenty-five years by someone on roller blades. Thompson Cager's ambitions for poetry are larger than most poets. . . the overall effect is grand as [she] creates her own myth of rejuvenation." Thompson Cager's chapbook Power Objects: A Message In A Bottle To My Daughter and Her Friends was published as the winner of the 1996 Artscape Poetry Competition judged by Josephine Jacobsen. Director of Spectrum of Poetic Fire Reading Series and host of the six-hour Saint Valentine Sunday Poetry Marathon at Maryland Institute College of Art, she recently edited When Divas Laugh by The Diva Squad Poetry Collective to be released by Black Classic Press in March 2001.