Performers

Artist featured on Narrative Stage sponsored by Toyota.

Nancy Mitchell is the inaugural poet laureate of the City of Salisbury, Maryland, 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 at Mt. San Angelo; in Auvillar, France; and at the Shotpouch Creek in Oregon.

Formerly a professor of creative writing at Salisbury University and producer of the annual literary/fine arts festival WORDSTOCK, Mitchell taught in the Maryland Summer Center for the Arts. An associate editor for Plume Poetry, she was the recipient of the Friends of Wicomico Libraries’ Light of Literacy Liz Bellavance Legacy Award in 2023. She is also a board member of the Salisbury Art Space and the Wicomico County Commission on Women. She serves her community by teaching workshops in various nonprofit organizations and by hosting the Poets’ Corner reading series at Salisbury Headquarters in Downtown Salisbury.

Nancy Mitchell will be at the Toyota Narrative Stage as part of Citizen Poet: The Role of the Poet Laureate in Community. Widely and wildly acclaimed, the beloved Maryland Poet Laureate Grace Cavalieri and Salisbury’s Poet Laureate Nancy Mitchell will discuss how their service as Poet Laureates has enriched their lives and fostered connections in their diverse communities.