“Performance Poetry Heals the Grieving Heart”

Join Gayle Danley for an electrifying 40-minute performance featuring her original poetry expressing and sharing her experience with grief and loss. This cathartic performance will feature raw emotion and foster a sense of community and hope among all attendees. Following the presentation, Gayle will host an informative question and answer session.

Gayle Danley is a championship poet and grief writer who has won both the national and international poetry slam titles. Her passion is teaching kids, through slam poetry, how to soothe their wounds. Danley traces her love for words, especially spoken word, to her childhood in Georgia, where she soaked up encyclopedias and carried around a book of rhymes (“Jack Sprat could eat no fat…” “Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear…”) because she adored how silly they were. “She was always reading and going to the library,” reports her uncle, who with his wife raised Danley as a child.

Danley has been named the Maryland Library Association’s Poet of the Year for 2018, the Young Audiences of Maryland Artist of the Year, and Young Audiences National Artist of the Year. She recently joined the Kennedy Center’s roster of master teaching artists, providing high-level arts integration workshops for language arts educators. She has been featured on 60 Minutes, in the Baltimore Sun, and the Washington Post. Her alma maters include Howard University and Syracuse University.