Orange County Arts Commission

Most of the time, Mark Katz teaches in pretty conventional spaces on the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus. But some of his classroom work happens elsewhere, in a place where he has to go through a metal detector and surrender his phone before entering. Orange Correctional Center, a minimum-security state prison in Hillsborough.

When Amanda Bennett was in her twenties as a graduate student at Duke University, she was working on a dissertation about Black feminism; she remembers studying writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker to understand how their lived experience allowed them to produce the work that they did.

If you have attended any sort of live-music event anywhere in the Triangle over the past three decades, chances are that Greg Bell was part of it. By his own admission, he’s done “a lot of stuff that does not fit on one resume, a lot or a little more of this or that.”

This December 20, on the eve of the shortest day of the year, an estimated 6,000 people are expected to gather in Downtown Hillsborough for the annual Solstice Lantern Walk and Market.

Redbud is a local creative writing organization, headquartered in Raleigh and serving the Triangle; they teach classes out of local bookstores and small businesses, including Flyleaf Books, McIntyres, Golden Fig Books, and My Muses Card Shop.

It takes most people a long time to figure out what they want to do as their life’s work. But Rody J. Huertas was just seventeen when he found his calling.

In 2021, Amanda Gorman—America’s first ever National Youth Poet Laureate —captured the public imagination in her canary yellow suit as she delivered an original poem at Joe Biden’s inauguration.