What We Keep, Keeps Us: Building Our Human Museum

This extended day retreat will be held on the restful grounds of The Avila Center and will be led by Jaki Shelton Green, the Poet Laureate of North Carolina.

The creativity salon will focus on the excavation of our human museums. Led by the teaching and guidance of Jaki, the day will explore questions such as:

In our ever-increasing technological trance how do we conflate or extrapolate public and private spheres of creativity, intimacy, spirituality, masks, dreams, veils, and spells?

What is body-centered knowing?

How do creatives and activists escape from conventional walls and play in mysterious forests?

What internalized perspectives are you choosing to excavate around levels of the self and assumptions?

What does it mean to decolonize the tongue that feeds your creativity and community engagement?

Leader: Jaki Shelton Green is the first African American and third woman to be appointed as the North Carolina Poet Laureate and was reappointed in 2021 for a second term by Governor Roy Cooper. She is a 2019 Academy of American Poet Laureate Fellow, 2014 NC Literary Hall of Fame Inductee, 2009 NC Piedmont Laureate appointment, 2003 recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature. Jaki Shelton Green teaches Documentary Poetry at Duke University Center for Documentary Studies and the 2021 Frank B. Hanes Writer in Residence at UNC Chapel Hill. Additionally, she received the George School Outstanding Alumni Award in 2021. Her publications include Dead on Arrival, Masks, Dead on Arrival and New Poems, Conjure Blues, singing a tree into dance, breath of the song, published by Blair Publishers. Feeding the Light, i want to undie you published by Jacar Press, i want to undie you English /Italian bilingual edition published by Lebeg Publishers. In 2020, she released her first poetry album, The River Speaks of Thirst and a CD, i want to undie you. In 2022 Jaki Shelton Green appointed as the Poet Laureate in Residence at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Location: The Avila Center, 711 Mason Road, Durham

Sliding scale costs: Equity: $45/ Standard: $60/ Pay It Forward: $75

Price Includes lunch.

Space is limited for this event, so register soon!