North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green and renowned artist Judith Ernst will discuss their collaborative public art project and honor the 100th anniversary of W.B Yeats’s seminal poem, “The Second Coming,” at an opening reception on October 9, 2019 beginning at 7:00 p.m. in the Florence and James Peacock Atrium of the FedEx Global Education Center.
Opening the evening will be Katie Bowler Young, director of Global Relations, followed by Terry Rhodes, interim dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, who will provide welcoming remarks. The program will then feature an overview of the installation by Ernst and a poetry reading of an excerpt from Green’s new poem, “Flowing Beneath the Center,” which she wrote in response to Yeats’s poem as part of the project. Green is the first African American Poet Laureate for North Carolina, a professor of documentary poetry in the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Ernst is an award-winning artist specializing in ceramics.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested. Parking is available in the McCauley Deck underneath the FedEx Global Education Center starting at 5 p.m.