Orange County Arts Commission

You’re most likely to run into Virginia Maxine Sloop in her natural habitat, in a rock-show crowd at Carrboro’s Cat’s Cradle (on occasion, you’ll see her working behind the bar there, too).

Writing books is a popular side-hustle for musicians, with Josh Ritter, Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle and the late Kinky Friedman among the many artists to have published books other than first-person memoirs.

Some years back, Danielle Rose went to the annual bluegrass festival regularly held at the Moorefields estate just outside of Hillsborough.

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.