Grace Ocasio and Justin Hunt Share Their Poetry and Memoir Pieces
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:05:47 — 60.4MB)
In today’s episode number 51, we meet poets Grace Ocasio and Justin Hunt and explore themes of family and relationships, which appear in much of their writing.Grace and Justin are accomplished and award-winning authors who are members of the Charlotte Writers Club.
Justin reads several poems that speak to the past. He also reads a section from his memoir where he’s driving across rural land no more traveled now than it was a half century earlier when he was a young boy in the back of the family’s big-fin Cadillac on the way to vacation in Colorado.
Grace reads poems inspired by her mother in the time when Rosa Parks took a seat, her great aunt who could overturn injustice like a mother right siding an upside down child and a grandmother whose scrapbook revealed a letter of her youth from an unknown admirer.
We start with Grace reading a poem called “Fall Festival,” inspired by family hayrides at harvest time, and a poem by Justin called “Afternoon on Slate Creek,” that captures the mood of a father and son, together, on a low bank, fishing poles in hand, bobber on the float.
Connect with the authors
You can connect with the Grace Ocasio at: www.mynameisgraceiwrite.com
You can connect with the Justin Hunt at:www.justinhunt.online
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About Grace:
Poet Grace C. Ocasio is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee whose forthcoming full-length volume of poetry, Family Reunion (Broadstone Books), received honorable mention in the Quercus Review Press Fall 2017 Book Award Contest. She placed as a finalist in the 2016 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in Poetry and received the 2014 North Carolina Arts Council Regional Artist Project Grant. Her chapbook, Hollerin from This Shack, was published by Ahadada Books in 2009 and her first full-length poetry collection, The Speed of Our Lives, was published by BlazeVOX Books in 2014. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Rattle, Court Green, Black Renaissance Noire, The Chaffin Journal, and Minerva Rising. Grace is a member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective, a group founded by distinguished author, Lenard D. Moore and serves as an adjunct professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
About Justin:
Poet and prose writer Justin Hunt grew up in rural Kansas and as is evident from what he reads on this podcast, his writing is inspired by his Kansas youth, his years living and working in Germany and the urge to leave behind something of himself and his time. In 2012, Justin retired from a long international business career in order to pursue his passion for writing. His work has won several awards and has appeared (or is forthcoming) in publications such as Arts & Letters, The Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Florida Review, Kansas City Voices, Ibbetson Street, The Live Canon Anthology (U.K.), Strokestown Poetry Anthology (Ireland) and Spoon River Poetry Review. Justin’s memoir,Dominoes Are Played at Joe’s Place (working title), a finalist in the 2018 William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, probes his relationship with his late father, who was born in 1897 to Kansas settlers.
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