Gracie Caggiano is an eclectic poet-composer, performer, and producer based in Kansas City, MO. Empathetic and fatefully existential, Gracie muses on complex emotions, crafting poetic spaces where listeners can speculate about love, vulnerability, meaning, and disability. Gracie creates embodied music which champions the limitations of her disability and reclaims the aesthetic value of fragility.

As a performer, she is known for her hauntingly beautiful vocals and authentic delivery. Her idiosyncratic guitar work often employs alternate tunings to facilitate weakness in her hands, resulting in colorful harmonic progressions. Joined by Katie Hedrick on viola, Gracie brings a set of alternative folk songs on disability topics to the Kansas City Public Library. These songs chronicle Gracie’s lived experience with a degenerative muscle disease, exploring thorns like pain and systemic barriers alongside beauties like access intimacy and interdependence.

In a similar spirit to Rebekah Taussig’s Sitting Pretty, Gracie’s songs invite listeners to ask questions about our dynamic experiences with disability throughout life and to bear witness to disability’s presence in our relationships with others and ourselves.

Big Read 2025 is supported in part by The National Endowment for the Arts Big Read, the City of Kansas City, Missouri Neighborhood Tourist Development Fund, and the Estelle S. and Robert A. Long Ellis Foundation. NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest. El Proyecto NEA Big Read es una iniciativa del National Endowment for the Arts (el Fondo Nacional para las Artes de Estados Unidos) en cooperacion con Arts Midwest.