Carrboro West End Poetry Festival attracts local poetry enthusiasts
Liza Wolff-Francis at WEPF 2024. Photo courtesy of the Town of Carrboro.
A community of North Carolina poets gathered this weekend for the annual West End Poetry Festival in Carrboro.
Spanning Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the festival included workshops and poetry readings.
Featured at the event were members of the Carrboro Poets Council along with youth poets and guest speakers. However, the festival was also open to the public.
Liza Wolff-Francis, the eighth Carrboro poet laureate and an active member of the Poets Council shared how it felt to run the event alongside the other council members.
“Everybody was really excited to help, be a part of it, and put their ideas in and just kind of help bring poetry to the area,” Wolff-Francis said. “We feel like we are leading the area in poetry — Carrboro, Chapel Hill, Hillsborough and Pittsboro a little bit too. We just have a lot of stuff going on.”
Thursday
The first festival activity was an open mic held on Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in Luna Rotisserie restaurant in Carrboro. Members of the Poets Council, including Wolff-Francis, gathered to enjoy the South American cuisine and recite self-written poems along with attendees.
Last year, the open mic event was held outside, but due to the cold weather it was held inside this year. Wolff-Francis said that although attendees missed having it outside, they were flexible with it being held inside.
Friday
On Friday, Oct. 18, North Carolina Poet Laureate and Duke University professor Jaki Shelton Green led a youth poetry workshop in the Carrboro ArtsCenter. Green engaged individuals between the ages of 11 and 24 with an activity where participants wrote their own poems based on a video, and taught about the importance of journaling as a budding writer.
18-year-old Hannah Reeves-Cowell, a student and acting Poet Laureate at Carrboro High School attended the workshop and reflected on how similar it felt to her view of writing.
“Her documentarian view is something that I unintentionally had a similarity with,” Cowell said. “And I think I'm going to be thinking about what I'm documenting now, but I think Jaki was just incredibly smart. She knows her stuff.”
A music jam session followed the workshop, which gave people the space to chat, write and recite poetry to live music played by Mahalo Jazz.
Saturday
The early afternoon on Saturday consisted of readings by the youth poet laureates of Orange County.
As one of the speakers for the youth poetry reading, Cowell expressed that she best writes poetry by using ordinary aspects of life.
“I take these mundane moments that don't really matter, and I give them significance,” she said. “Like picking blackberries with a friend, or the sound of a cicada during summer — small things in nature or my life — and I like focusing on one thing and sort of expanding on everything around that moment itself.”
After the youth readings, the event continued with readings and discussions by published authors based in North Carolina. They included John Hoppenthaler, Fred Joiner, Debra Kaufman, Ashley Lumpkin and Ralph Earle.
Ashley Lumpkin, an author, math teacher at Noble Academy in Greensboro and active member of the Bull City Slam Team gave insight on how she performed her poetry for the stage.
“For the people who are physically leaned in and trying to give me their attention, I do my best to just make eye contact and let them know, ‘I don't know if you were the one that I'm supposed to be talking to today, but just in case, here's my energy. I got you,'" Lumpkin said.
Lumpkin has published six poetry collections, including her book “The Sad Stays” which was released on Oct. 12.
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“Now I feel prolific because I've got all these published books,” she said. “And that feeling has carried me on."
Along with the poetry readings, Emilia Phillips, who is an associate professor of creative writing at UNC Greensboro, hosted a writing workshop where she taught a linguistic approach to creating new words for poems.
Following Phillips' workshop, readings and discussions were held by North Carolina Hall of Fame poets Joseph Bathanti and Lenard Moore.
The festival ended with a Poetry Slam, hosted by the North Carolina Inaugural Poet Laureate Josephus Thompson III at the Steel String Brewery, with an awarded lottery prize of $100 to one of the participants.
Josephus Thompson III hosts the 2024 WEPF poetry Slam at Steel String Brewing. Photo courtesy of the Town of Carrboro.
As a whole, Wolff-Francis hopes the poetry festival can inspire everyone involved to start writing, or if they already do to make it a habit.
“I think if everybody could write a little poetry, it would make the world better.”
