WENTWORTH – Jaki Shelton Green, 70, North Carolina’s first African American poet laureate, met with students, faculty and community leaders to share some of her stories and poetry in the Gerald B. James Library at Rockingham Community College on April 9.
Shelton held the audience captive, the majority of which were RCC Early College students, for a little more than an hour, sharing her family stories, poetry and writing process.
As a young girl, Green learned these stories from her grandmother, some of which were very similar to those told by renowned late author Alexander Haley, who wrote the groundbreaking 1976 book “Roots.” That book was later adapted into a multiple award-winning television mini-series by the same name and broadcasted in 1977 to a global audience estimated to be seen by 130 million viewers at the time.
Her great, great, great grandmother was a third-generation slave and passed on many of the family stories that survived through the generations.
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Like Haley’s collection of documented stories, Green’s oral history somehow survived the test of time.
Green said the aforementioned ancestor had a white half-sister, and both girls were fathered by the slave owner.
The white sister secretly taught Green’s ancestor how to read, and when her literacy was discovered, she was sold away from her birth family. At the time, teaching a Black person to read and write was against the law.
Green said as a young girl, her grandmother shared these, and many more tragic, yet heroic stories of overcoming obstacles, which began her life’s mission of sharing the history of the ancestors.
Over the years, she eventually evolved into an ambassador of literary arts through her poetry with the gift of language.
During the event, Green read several poems to the RCC audience and shared the events, thoughts and feelings that inspired them.
“The stories we keep, keep us,” she explained. Over the course of her life, she has written and continues to write about the world around her. Some of the stories from the time of slavery, the Civil Rights movement and the politics of the modern day continue to inspire poems of beauty that have emerged from some of those tragic situations. Green said she considers her art as documentary poetry, and it is her way of framing historic moments.
Green is a 2019 Academy of American Poet Laureate Fellow, 2014 NC Literary Hall of Fame Inductee, 2009 NC Piedmont Laureate appointment and 2003 recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature.
Green teaches Documentary Poetry at Duke University Center for Documentary Studies and was appointed the 2021 Frank B. Hanes Writer in Residence at UNC-Chapel Hill. Additionally, she received the George School Outstanding Alumni Award in 2021.
Historic Appointment
Green also spoke of how she was informed of the appointment as North Carolina’s Poet Laureate, which started with a phone call she will never forget. On the other end of the call a voice said, “I’d like to speak with Jaki Shelton Green—this is Gov. Roy Cooper.” Green thought it was a joke and responded as most would—sarcastically, “yeah right,” she said.
The voice responded a little more emphatically—“no, this IS Gov. Roy Cooper” who informed her she was being appointed as North Carolina’s official poet laureate.
When she realized it wasn’t a prank call, she screamed in the governor’s ear Green told the audience. To put this appointment into perspective, she was selected from 3,000 qualified candidates to represent the state of North Carolina.
Green is not only the first African American woman but only the third female to be appointed as the North Carolina Poet Laureate since the honor’s inception in 1948. She was reappointed in 2021 for a second term by Gov. Cooper.
She explained to everyone in the room that virtually all of their ancestors came to America on different ships, some by choice, others in chains. But she said we are now all in this world together.
“There’s only one boat, and we are all in it,” she said.