QL: POR Proudly Presents Celebrating the Muse: Two Women and their Poetry

Jackie Oldham (she/her) is a writer from Baltimore, Maryland. After retiring from a career as a scientific copy editor and trainer in 2013, Jackie returned to writing, which, along with music, fuels and fulfills her soul. Since December 2014, she has been writing a personal blog, baltimoreblackwoman.com (WordPress), featuring essays, memoirs, and poems about life and family in her hometown. Since 2018, her focus has shifted to poetry. In addition to venues in Baltimore, she has read her works on the Quintessential Listening: Poetry podcast (2019-2022) and the Black Poets Matter series (Mad Mouth Poetry on Facebook, 2020). Since 2020, her poems have been published in the journals Oddball Magazine, Global Poemic, Rigorous Magazine, and Spillwords Press, and in the book A Lovely Place, A Fighting Place, A Charmer: The Baltimore Anthology.

Lynne Viti was born and raised in Baltimore and now lives in Massachusetts. She has published four poetry collections, including the recently released _The Walk to Cefalù_, from the Cornerstone Press /Portage Press Poetry Series. Her poetry, nonfiction, and fiction have appeared in over 150 journals and anthologies, including The Wire: Urban Decay and American Television, Welcome to the Neighborhood and A Lovely Place, a Fighting Place, A Charmer: Baltimore Anthology. A lecturer emerita at Wellesley College, she leads poetry workshops and teaches in community programs in the Boston area. Her poems have received recognition in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest, the Joe Gouveia Poetry Contest, and the Fish Publishing Poetry Contest.