Catherine Woodard is a poet, nonprofit strategist and former newspaper reporter and digital news editor. She is the author of Opening the Mouth of the Dead, a narrative story in poems published in 2017 as a limited edition book art and paperback. She is president of the Poetry Society of America and a former president of Artists Space for emerging artists. She is a board member of Press Pass NYC, which provides public high schools free resources to start sustainable student newspapers. She began her journalism career at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. As a reporter at New York Newsday and Newsday, she won public service awards for investigative stories about HIV/AIDS and drug-resistant TB, and tax policies that cheated under-resourced school districts. She previously chaired NLP’s New York Advisory Committee and served on its National Journalism Advisory Council.