NC Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green to visit Wake Forest on September 29

Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina’s Poet Laureate, will visit Wake Forest University on Thursday, September 29, to meet with students and give a public poetry reading. Part of the Edwin G. Wilson Speaker Series, this event is sponsored by Department of English, ZSR Library, the Finley Foundation, and Dr. Edwin G. and Emily Wilson. It is free and open to public.

Jaki Shelton Green, September 29, 2022: 

Interactive Dialogue with WFU Students, 2:30-3:30 pm, ZSR Library Auditorium (Room 404)
Join us for cookies and a discussion about poetry and community with a venerated author and the most important representative of the literary arts in North Carolina: the State Poet Laureate! All students interested in reading or writing poetry, and interested in the ways the arts intersect with politics and can be used to build community, should plan to join us, regardless of major or background.

Public Poetry Reading & Book Signing, 6 pm in Porter Byrum Welcome Center
Open to faculty, staff, students, alumni, and the public. A book signing will follow.

---

Jaki Shelton Green is North Carolina’s ninth and current Poet Laureate. Appointed in 2018—and reappointed in 2021—by Governor Roy Cooper, she is the first African American and third woman to serve as the state’s ambassador for poetry and the spoken word. She is the North Carolina Museum of Art’s 2022 Poet in Residence, the recipient of the George School Outstanding Alumni Award in 2021, a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, a 2014 NC Literary Hall of Fame Inductee, the 2009 NC Piedmont Laureate, and the 2003 recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature. She teaches Documentary Poetry at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and was appointed the Frank B. Hanes Writer-in-Residence at UNC Chapel Hill in 2021.

Shelton Green’s publications include Dead on Arrival, Masks, Dead on Arrival and New Poems, Conjure Blues, singing a tree into dance, and breath of the song, published by Carolina Wren Press and Blair. Two more publications, Feeding the Light and i want to undie you, are published by Jacar Press. A bilingual English/Italian edition of i want to undie you (voglio strapparti alla morte) was published by Lebeg Edizioni in 2021. In 2020, she released her first poetry album, The River Speaks of Thirst, and a CD, i want to undie you.

More information about the Poet Laureate can be found on her website, jakisheltongreen.com.