In today’s episode, 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.