The Carrboro Django Reinhardt Festival is a fantastic semi-annual event that offers a solid crash course in gypsy jazz. The festival’s fifth edition is set for March 20-22, 2026, mostly at Cat’s Cradle Back Room, with a cast of great musicians from as far away as The Netherlands.
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.
Jessica Webb, who is in her eighties, almost gave up on art. Although she had been painting for 25 years, one summer day in 2024, she went to The ArtsCenter to donate her paintings, hoping that the canvases could be used by other artists.
In the mid-nineties, Donovan Livingston, who is now Chapel Hill’s 2025-2026 Poet Laureate, heard a song that would change his life. Growing up with a grandmother who was a church choir director, Livingston was surrounded by music and fascinated by hip hop, but he wasn’t allowed to listen to rap music.
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.