For more information about Jaki Shelton Green and her work, visit her website: https://jakisheltongreen.com

Listen to Jaki Shelton Green read her entire story, “Singing Tables,” from The Carolina Table:

Read “Red Clay & Jewels,” Wiley Cash’s profile of Jaki Shelton Green, from WALTER Magazine (February 2022). https://waltermagazine.com/art-and-culture/jaki-shelton-green-red-clay-and-jewels/

Purchase The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food (Eno Publishers): http://www.enopublishers.org/books/the-carolina-table-north-carolina-writers-on-food

Listen to Jaki Shelton Green read her poem, “who will be the messenger of this land,” published in Eno Publishers’s 27 Views of Hillsborough: A Southern Town in Prose & Poetry. (Former President Barack Obama is rumored to be a fan of this poem.)

Listen to Jaki Shelton Green read her poem, “a feast of whispers,” from The Elizabeth Keckley Reader, Volume Two.

Podcast music for “Feasting on Words With Jaki Shelton Green” is entitled “Her,” by Hara Noda. Available on Epidemic Sound. https://www.epidemicsound.com/artists/hara-noda/

Episode 6: Show Notes

Feasting on Words With Jaki Shelton Green

Exploring the poetry of food

North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green knows food. She loves to cook, to taste, to celebrate food, in the same way she writes and celebrates language. Long before the farm-to-table movement became popular, the garden was a rite of summer for families everywhere. Jaki's family was no exception. As soon as the garden “came in,” they would spring into action--pick, snap, shuck, peel, rinse, freeze, stew, preserve. Meals were lovingly prepared—for family, visiting cousins, church ladies, friends. At a young age, Jaki Shelton Green learned the power of food, its poetry, its ability to heal, to communicate, to comfort, its eloquence. In her essay “Singing Tables,” from The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food, she tells her life story through food.

Bio note—

Poet Jaki Shelton Green loves to cook, to taste, to celebrate food, in the same way she love to write and celebrate language. She is the ninth Poet Laureate of North Carolina and the first African American and the third woman to be appointed to this post. Forbes magazine named Jaki Shelton Green to the 50 Over 50 list of the most influential women in the nation who are reshaping the face of entertainment and the arts. She is a 2019 Academy of American Poet Laureate Fellow, 2014 NC Literary Hall of Fame Inductee, 2009 NC Piedmont Laureate appointment, 2003 recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature. She teaches Documentary Poetry at Duke University Center for Documentary Studies and was appointed the 2021 Frank B. Hanes Writer in Residence at UNC Chapel Hill. Additionally, she received the George School Outstanding Alumni Award in 2021. In 2022, she was appointed as Poet Laureate in Residence at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Her poetry collections include Dead on Arrival, Masks, Conjure Blues, and singing a tree into dance, breath of the song, Feeding the Light, i want to undie you. On Juneteenth 2020, she released her first poetry album, The River Speaks of Thirst. Her story, “Singing Tables,” was published in Eno Publishers’s anthology, The Carolina Table: North Carolina Writers on Food. She is also a contributor to Eno Publishers’ anthologies 27 Views of Hillsborough: A Southern Town in Prose and Poetry and The Elizabeth Keckley Reader, Volume Two.