Crystal Simone Smith News Today

“Songs in Flight,” a new cycle by composer Shawn Okpebholo, with texts chosen by Tsitsi Ella Jaji, a poet and associate professor at Duke Un

The composer Shawn Okpebholo has created a song cycle that imagines the inner lives of fugitives from American slavery.

Crystal Simone Smith discusses Dark Testament: Blackout Poems, her found poems from George Saunders's acclaimed novel Lincoln in the Bardo

Bertha Johnson, Durhams deputy city manager, noted that poet laureate programs promote opportunities for organizations and municipalities to formally recognize poets’ contributions to literary culture and society.

Every summer until this one, I looked forward to summer in Alabama in my dad’s backyard garden. Summer meant the end of the regular school year, the beginning of days spent watching vegetables and flowers grow, to smelling watermelons (which I don’t eat—my parents do that all on their own) halved in the kitchen, to the slow spill of sunset over Birmingham. That renewal each year also included poetry—readings, books checked out from the library, the bubbling thrill of planning for new se...