Story via Arshia Simkin, The Underline, Orange County Arts Commission
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. “I feel like there can be such pressure for Black women who are writers or who are in public positions to act like you have everything together and that you are fully formed and perfect the second you achieve anything—and that’s just not realistic. I want to be able to leave a legacy for young Black women that shows that you can be imperfect and also worthy and in process and also loved,” Bennett said.
Now, as Carrboro’s ninth poet laureate, and first Black woman to serve, Bennett, who is a postdoctoral fellow at UNC Chapel Hill’s Arts & Humanities Grant Studio, is continuing her mission to uplift young marginalized voices: “I hope in my role as laureate that I can help to facilitate the sustainability of the beautiful grassroots arts culture” of Orange County, Bennett said.
Amanda Bennett
Bennett’s first poetry collection, Working the Roots, published in 2025, sprang from her desire to showcase the beauty of a life in progress. In the collection, Bennett said, “I was trying to create a cosmology of care and repair that centers the needs of Black women and femmes and thinking about things like pleasure, relationships, and ancestry as ways we come to understand ourselves and love ourselves.” She also addresses similar themes in her Substack newsletter, Woo in the Real World: “I am using Afro-diasporic spiritual frameworks and spiritual practices to help people find clarity and also practice collective imagination for futures that are radically inclusive,” Bennett said.
For Bennett, poetry has been a life-long endeavor: “I’ve been writing poetry since I was a little girl—and for me poetry was always a way to metabolize things that were going on around me,” she said. It helped her to process difficult issues ranging from witnessing violence to contending with the news of tragedies such as Hurricane Katrina. “I realized that poetry was a way for people who stories have not historically been represented in dominant narratives to be celebrated and told in a register that was authentic to their cultural lived experience,” she said.
As laureate, Bennett is excited to implement several programs that will both showcase and amplify the diversity of local poetry. One of the programs is called “Poet,” which pays homage to the 1990s ‘Read’ posters that featured celebrities posing with books; but instead of Hollywood actors, the posters would feature local poets. Another program is called “Where Will the Children Play” which will be an intergenerational storytelling and creative writing space where participants would discuss issues of gender and sexuality, self-love, and personal development through the lens of children’s stories. The third program is called “Black Girl Dreaming,” which will focus on mentorship of young Black poets. For Bennett, whose doctoral study was in the public humanities, it is important to center and respect the “cultural intelligence that Black women do bring into the space,” she said.
For Bennett, sharing both her personal experiences through her poetry and in her more theoretical explorations in essays is a way of bridging the gaps in an increasingly polarized society. She said that through her writing she hopes that “people will feel comfortable to step into this idea of the interior as a warm, well-lighted space that we are all collectively responsible for taking care of through how we treat each other.”
Learn more about Bennett’s upcoming events at https://linktr.ee/aquapoet94; check out her Substack at https://amandabennett.substack.com/; learn more about her poetry collection, Working the Roots at https://www.querenciapress.com/working-the-roots-by-amanda-bennett
(story and photos via Orange County Arts Commission)
Chapelboro.com has partnered with the Orange County Arts Commission to bring more arts-focused content to our readers through columns written by local people about some of the fantastic things happening in our local arts scene! Since 1985, the OCAC has worked to to promote and strengthen the artistic and cultural development of Orange County, North Carolina.
