The Carolina African American Writers’ Collective gather in the Nasher Museum Sculpture Garden to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic
Five haiku poets of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective gathered in the Nasher Museum Sculpture Garden and responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and the global protest movement against police brutality toward Black and brown lives.
More about the poets
Valeria Bullock, MSOTR/L, has been a member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective since 2019. Her poems have been featured in publications such as Frog Pond, Haiku North America Anthology Sitting In The Sun, Femku digital magazine, and CAAWC’s 25 Anniversary Anthology, All The Songs We Sing (Blair, 2020).
L. Teresa Church, Ph.D., has been a member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective since 1995. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Simply Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Solo Café, Nocturnes: (Re)view of the Literary Arts, African American Review, North Carolina Literary Review, her chapbooks Hand-Me-Down Calicos and Beyond the Water Dance, One Window’s Light: A Collection of Haiku, and All the Songs We Sing: Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective.
Lenard D. Moore is founder and executive director of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. His literary works have been published in more than 15 countries and translated into more than a dozen languages. Moore is the author of Geography of Jazz, A Temple Looming, Desert Storm: A Brief History, Forever Home, and The Open Eye, among others. He is the editor for One Window’s Light: A Collection of Haiku (2017) and All The Songs We Sing: Celebrating The 25th Anniversary Of The Carolina African American Writers’ Collective (2020). He is executive chairman of the North Carolina Haiku Society. He was the first African-American president of the Haiku Society of America. Moore’s awards include the Haiku Museum of Tokyo Award (1983, 1994 and 2003) and the North Carolina Award for Literature (2014). His work has appeared in The Haiku Anthology (Norton, 1999) and Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (Norton, 2013), among other publications. Moore is a U.S. Army veteran.
Crystal Simone Smith, a Duke Unbound Humanities Fellow, is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Routes Home (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and Running Music (Longleaf Press, 2014). She is also the author of Wildflowers: Haiku, Senryu, and Haibun (2016). Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, Nimrod, Barrow Street, and African American Review. She is an alumna of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the Yale Summer Writers Conference. She is also the founder of Backbone Press.
Gideon Young, whose poetry has appeared in Acorn, Carve Magazine, Kingfisher, Modern Haiku, and Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, is a co-author of One Window’s Light: A Collection of Haiku (Unicorn Press, 2017), winner of the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Award for Best Anthology. Gideon is a Fellow for A+ Schools of North Carolina, a K-12 literacy specialist, and stay-at-home father
