Dancing The Words: A Conversation and Reading with Mary Moore Easter and Lillo Way

Folio is pleased to invite you to a lunch time conversation and poetry reading with poets and dancers Mary Moore Easter and Lillo Way. Interviewed by Ciara McCormack.

Dancers and choreographers literally embody rhythm, sound, dynamics, breath, and phrasing—all essential elements of poetry.  Lillo and Mary will share stories from their careers as dancers and choreographers, and discuss how dance, music and theater have influenced the structure and style of their poems.

At the still point of the turning world...there the dance is. —T.S. Eliot

Hard times require furious dancing.―Alice Walker

Lillo Way is numerous times a Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist. Her work has appeared in RHINO, Poet Lore, Tampa Review, New Letters, Louisville Review, New Orleans Review, Tar River Poetry, Madison Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Poetry East, The American Journal of Poetry, among others. Twelve of Way's poems are included in anthologies. Way has received grants from the National Endowment the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for her choreographic work involving poetry. Way served on the faculty of the Dance Program of the School of Education at New York University for five years, one of which years, she was Assistant Professor and Artist-in-Residence. She taught at Hunter College for four years, and was a guest artist/instructor at Princeton University. She also taught at the University of Maryland and Barnard College, and presented lectures and workshops at other colleges and universities throughout the country.

Mary Moore Easter is the author of The Body of the World (Minnesota Book Award in Poetry Finalist, 2019); Walking from Origins; From the Flutes of Our Bones (fall 2020), and Free Papers. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, Cave Canem Fellow, veteran dancer /choreographer, and emerita professor of dance at Carleton College, Easter is the mother of two daughters and four grandchildren.

Ciara McCormack Greenwalt is a human, educator, dancer, and poet living in Seattle. Ciara grew up in Burlington, Vermont and small-town Nebraska, where she studied dance intensively alongside an extracurricular smorgasbord of piano, band, choir, theater, and writing workshops. In 2011, she graduated Summa Cum Laude from Stephens College with a BFA in Dance and a minor in Creative Writing.  Her written work has been published in Seattle Dances, The Night Heron Barks (2021), Oberon Poetry Magazine (2019), and The Untidy Season (2014 Nebraska Book Award), among others. In 2008, her poetry won the Nebraska Poetry of Place award.  She currently performs with Intrepidus Dance and Lucia Neare’s Theatrical Wonders and directs Moving Minds Dance. More at ciaragreenwalt.com.