Marjory Wentworth is the New York Times bestselling author of Out of Wonder, Poems Celebrating Poets (with Kwame Alexander and Chris Colderley) and many other works and poems. Her poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize six times. She is the current poet laureate of South Carolina. Wentworth serves on the Board of Advisors at The Global Social Justice Practice Academy, and she is a 2020 National Coalition Against Censorship Free Speech is for Me Advocate. She teaches courses in writing, social justice, and banned books at The College of Charleston.

Marjory first met Dottie in the early 2000s at a party; the next evening Dottie showed up at her door with a bottle wine and Marjory’s first book of poems and asked her if she could include one of her poems in the front of her forthcoming novel, Plantation. Their mutual love of the South Carolina low country bonded them, and their friendship was immediate. Both women were married to men named Peter; even their children were the same ages, and they remain friends to this day. Sometimes friends become family, and it doesn’t get better than that.