The North Carolina Humanities Council has awarded Jaki Shelton Green the 2019 John Tyler Campbell Award for the Humanities, the council’s highest honor.
The Caldwell Award will recognize Green for her lifelong achievements as a teacher, humanities advocate and ambassador for poetry and the spoken word in North Carolina.
Jaki Shelton Green is the current poet laureate of North Carolina. She was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2014, was the 2009 NC Piedmont Laureate, and in 2003 received the North Carolina Award for Literature for her fine poetry and “inveterate championing of the underdog.” Her poetry collections and chapbooks include Feeding the Light, breath of the song, Dead on Arrival, Conjure Blues, and singing a tree into dance. Her poetry has appeared in The Crucible, The African-American Review, Obsidian, Ms., and Essence. She lives in Mebane.
A public ceremony and reception will be held in Durham in October of 2019. Event details will be announced in early summer. The event will be free and open to the public.
For more information, visit http://www.nchumanities.org/content/caldwell-award.