Chezia Thompson Cager, Director...
Chezia Thompson Cager
accepted the legacy
of Spectrum's commitment to provide vision and insight
into intersecting worlds of poetic text in 1999. A
Maryland State Arts Council Individual Award recipient
for 1999 and 2001, a 1996 Artscape Poetry competition
winner (selected by Josephine Jacobsen), a 2002 finalist
for the Naomi Madget Long Poetry Award at Lotus Press,
and Atlantic Center for the arts and Bread Loaf grant
2002 recipient, Dr. Thompson has published work in a
wide range of poetry journals that recently include: Gargoyle, Potomac Review, Poet Lore, Maryland Poetry
Review, Poetry New Zealand and Puerto Del Sol. She has 2 Chapbooks
including Artscape winner Power Objectives and a book
published by Maisonneuve Press - The Presence of Things Unseen:
Giant Talk and a compilation project called When Divas Laugh,
which she edited from the Diva Squad Poetry Collective available
through Black Classic Press. Her poems appear in the following
anthologies: From Totems to Hip Hop edited by Ishmael Reed
(2003); Catch the Fire edited by Derrick I. Gilbert; Dark
Eros edited by Reginald Martin; Thy Mothers Glass edited
by Diane Scharper; and Moving Beyond Boundaries edited by
Boyce-Davies and Ogundipe-Leslie.
Her new
compilation with Kendra Kopelke and Clarind Harris When Divas
Dance is due out next year. Teaching Jean Toomer's 1923
CANE will be available through Peter Lang Publisher's special
African American Literature series next year.
An Alumni
of the first African-American High School established west of the
Mississippi (Sumner High School), she is a product of English
Chairman Dorothy Matlock's idea of an artist-warrior. A
graduate of Washington University (where she studied with Howard
Nemerov and Watts Poetry Workshop Poet, K. Curtis Lyle; and
Carnegie-Mellon University , her research studies in Nigeria,
Jamaica and Haiti (in relationship to the work of Langston Hughes,
Zora Neale Hurston and Wole Soyinka), have been the source of her
diaspora approach to poetic syntax, theatre direction and curatorial
work, bringing image and text together. A member of Carolina
African-American Writers Collective, she was born and raised in St.
Louis Missouri on the Mississippi River. She lives with her family in
Baltimore in H.L. Mencken's Union Square.
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