Department of English

“Messenger of this Land”: Jaki Shelton Green’s Black Feminist Landscape Poetic by Maia L. Butler and Lindsey Mitchell | This article is the first to address the extant oeuvre–inextricably literary, pedagogical, and activist– of North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green and frame her impressive imaginary and impact across scales from the local to the global. Drawing on the fields of Black women’s literary studies, Black feminist geographies, and Black feminist archival praxes, we examine Shelton Green’s engagement with land and landscape, and exploration and documentation of how Black communities make and sustain home, community, and belonging through what we call her Black feminist landscape poetic. We frame her “Artist as Citizen,” poetic agenda, examining how she renders her generational rootedness to North Carolina landscapes and communities, as well as her Black Atlantic sensibilities, finally discussing how her rendering of her own relationship with the land, in the tradition of Black migration, labor, settlement, and stewardship invokes historical echoes, Black conceptions of ancestry and lineage, and Black women’s ways of knowing the land and the messages it holds for us.

Dr. Alessandro Porco is coeditor of the recently published Anthology of Black Mountain College Poetry (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2025), named by NPR's Due South as one of the "most anticipated books" of the spring and described by Ron Silliman as "literally the best presentation of any literary phenomenon we have had in the United States."