Exploring Our Human Museum

Join us for a special Big Read in Charlotte writing workshop that also honors Women's History Month. North Carolina Poet Laureate, Jaki Shelton Green, facilitates a creativity salon focused on What We Keep Keeps Us: Exploring Our Human Museums. This creativity salon weaves through the layers of identity, historical memory, traditions, and artifacts that provide the eloquence of the many landscapes in Yaa Gyasi’s book, Homegoing. Participants are invited to bring artifacts, photos, heirlooms, or stories that hold special meaning for them. This session includes writing and discussion that examines the many narratives, memoirs, stories, poems, novels, and legacies that are hidden in plain sight... just waiting to be written.

All workshop participants should have read Homegoing, the book selected for the Big Read program. Registered participants may receive a free copy of the book by contacting the Gantt's Museum Store.

The Big Read in Charlotte is a five-month-long series of free events designed to inform, engage, and promote literacy in our community – centered on the community-wide reading Yaa Gyasi’s novel, Homegoing. The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest created to broaden our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the power of a shared reading experience.

Jaki Shelton Green is the first African American and third woman to be appointed as the North Carolina Poet Laureate. She teaches Documentary Poetry at Duke University Center for Documentary Studies and she is the 2021 Frank B. Hanes Writer in Residence at UNC Chapel Hill. Jaki is the owner of SistaWRITE, an organization that provides writing retreats for women writers in Sedona, Arizona, Martha's Vineyard, Ocracoke, North Carolina, Northern Morocco in Africa, and Tullamore, Ireland. She serves as the poetry editor for WALTER Magazine and as the Poet Laureate in Residence at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

Jaki has been recognized by Forbes Magazine for the 50 Over 50 Lifestyle List for 2022. Her publications include Dead on Arrival, Masks, Conjure Blues, singing a tree into dance, breath of the song, Feeding the Light, and i want to undie you. In 2020, Jaki released her first LP, poetry album, The River Speaks of Thirst followed by a CD, i want to undie you in 2021.