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Cortland Gilliam, PhD

@corter_pounder

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Dir of Engagement @carolinaperformingarts, Poet Laureate of CH (2023-2024), Humanities Scholar, Educator. Cultural organizer
more to bare/bear

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Nothing Abides"....even after a 2-3 yr hiatus
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Excited to join an amazing cast of story and sound weavers for this 60th Anniversary Benefit Concert for the Eno at Carolina Theater, organized by @enoriver
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Brian Howe and I will be adapting our piece, Nothing Abides, a dialogue through sound and poetry that we originally debuted in August of 2023. The piece emanated from six months of being writers in residence at @culturemillnc participating in the evolution of a community care practice and dance theater performance called Eclipse, which turns bricks signifying those laid by the Black builders of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill into amplifiers for their voices and legacies, reframing the university's own creation myth
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Get ya tickies! by @corter_pounder

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5

a month ago

Yet & Still
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Love to the keepers of language who penned this beautiful letter and declaration of love to all African descended students on UNC's campus, many of whom learned a generational and unjust lesson last week on our campus.

You, too, are a mirror.

Sincerely,

A former Black UNC undergraduate ('14) and graduate ('25) student and current university employee
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👇🏿
#blackandcarolinablue #yetandstillunc #blackoutloudunc
👇🏿
Sign letter here -
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qxrDKOXdTdBw_WEuaO6i3-sUM8Vlc2E6/view?usp=drivesdk by @corter_pounder

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a month ago

I'm thrilled about the first birthday party for Encounters for the Living and the Dead--my debut poetry collection from @riverriverbooks. Poets Cortland Gilliam, Lightsey Darst, and Gabrielle Calvocoressi will join me on Wednesday, September 23, at 6:30pm
✨
Jameela F. Dallis is a Durham, NC-based poet and curator. She has poems, interviews, and literary scholarship in Feminist Studies, Honey Literary, The Fight and the Fiddle, and elsewhere. She's a bon vivant who loves dogs, writes in bars, and travels solo, but she's a hopeless romantic, too. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from UNC-Chapel Hill. Read more about her work at jameeladallis.com.
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Cortland Gilliam, PhD, is a poet, educator, cultural organizer, humanities scholar, and the present Director of Engagement at Carolina Performing Arts. He serves the Boards of Directors for two local nonprofits, the Marian Cheek Jackson Center and Prism Design Lab. His poetry has been published in WALTER Magazine, Gulfstream Magazine, and the Triangle Poetry Twenty-Twenty-One anthology. After nearly a decade of poeting around the Triangle area, Cortland served as the 2023-2024 Poet Laureate of the Town of Chapel Hill, integrating his studies and practices of cultural-political space-making and community building through poetry and the arts.
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Lightsey Darst has published four books of poetry with Coffee House Press, most recently The Heiress/Ghost Acres (2023). Her awards include two NEA fellowships and a Minnesota Book Award. Her poems have been published in Pleiades, The Bennington Review, Diagram, and other journals. She lives in Durham NC with her family.
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Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s new collection of poetry, The New Economy, was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry. Other collections include The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing, and Rocket Fantastic, which is the winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. They serve on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets and live in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.
🎉
There'll be poems, bevs, and some sweet thin taken in Letters Bookshop by @corter_pounder

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a month ago

Lately
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Life has been teaching
How
to hold
Contradiction
to heal
To release
to sit in
to sit with
Self
to get over
to get through
to stay true to course
to trial a trail
To travel
To travel
With grace
to grow
With courage
to cry
to care
Enough
To be by @corter_pounder

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3 months ago

Beloved community, I'm reaching out with a mutual aid request to support my dear brother and gifted collaborator, @mugisha_frank_, at a critical moment in his artistic career.

I had the privilege of working with Frank on a transnational, multi-media performance called How to Be A Visitor, which debuted at ADF 2025 and was produced by Tommy Noonan of Culture Mill in collaboration with Frank and his team in Kampala, Uganda, and Jassem Hindi in Oslon Norway.

I had the added privilege seeing Frank perform some 6-7years prior in a heart openning performance alongside Chapel Hill's very own CJ Suitt entitled East Africa Meets East Chapel Hill.

The NC Triangle is just one of the many creative hubs and ecosystems that Frank Mugisha has been a part of in the US. This past fall, Frank was on a US Tour doing performances in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast with plans of making his way back to the Triangle when he fell ill, forcing him to forfeit several performance and teaching gigs and and seek an emergency flight home to Rwanda, IN TODAY'S ECONOMY... Naturally, this trip ended up being more costly and less lucrative as anticipated, and has introduced some new financial challenges that have impeded the ease with which Frank can get around and make art back home and abroad.

Fortunately, Frank has been able to land some performance residencies with the National Theater in Kigali to develop a new piece, "Who, Me?", but the residency is self-funded.

So I'm calling on y'all here to help me help Frank help the world with his art (iyky). Funds gifted will support Frank with building out a new hour long production (including payment of collaborators), with creating his own merchandise that can be sold in artist market networks in Uganda, and with travel and living expenses needed to get around and be well.

We're hoping to raise $1500 over a couple of weeks, and with y'all's support, I think we can make that happen! Help me sow into this brother who has sown into so many locally and beyond. All funds to my venmo (@Cortland-Gilliam) with a note that names "Frank" will be transferred to an account he has access to. Any amount helps

Publicly/privately, pls share widely by @corter_pounder

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5 months ago

This past year I began a journey of return and reconnection to love and self
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Excited to experience all of the presence, perspective, and purpose that 34 will bring
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Blessings on blessings on blessings
To be alive.
Today.
To love and be loved.
To be love.
🙏🏿🖤✌🏿
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(A day late posting this, but thank y'all for the bday love)
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#15📸 by @nansa.nansaa by @corter_pounder

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9 months ago

Happy New Year from the Prism crew!!!

We're closing out the year with a poem about Belonging, written together by poet Cortland Gilliam and 5th graders at Frank Porter Graham Elementary.

We had the joy of witnessing @corter_pounder as he engaged students in creating poetry this fall through the Rising Voices Poetry Project.

We continue to be inspired by the young people in our community and hope that their perspectives bring you joy and peace in the new year.

The Rising Voices Poetry Project is made possible through the support of the Town of Chapel Hill's Arts & Culture Award Program, and the Frances R. Dewing Foundation. by @corter_pounder

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10 months ago

This is the winter for letting go of comforts keeping us out in the cold. Saturday, Dec. 20 Poets’ Playground welcomes former Poet Laureate @corter_pounder to share poetry & lead a writing and sharing session. ✍️🎤🔥

🎟️Limited tickets available for free or $5 at the link in bio.

Cortland is, among his Ph.D and many artistic accomplishments, a soulful shuffling ray of love.

Together, we’ll write, share, and burn away what’s no longer serving us and take the first step to rediscovering our own warmth within. 🌻

Cortland Gilliam is a poet, educator, and cultural organizer with a Ph.D in Cultural Studies and Literacies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Poet Laureate of Chapel Hill between 2023 and 2024, he continues he to study cultures, civics, and histories of Black youth contributions to liberation movements of the late twentieth century.

Return to Cinders is a Poets’ Playground production by @thirdanglepoets , powered by @boxyardrtp

Beautiful headshots like Cortland’s by @theshootingbeauty

#poetry #writing #transformation taken in Boxyard RTP by @corter_pounder

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10 months ago

One show down, one more to go! Thank you all who came to our first show of How To Be A Visitor at @amerdancefest #adf2025 Catch it tomorrow (6/22), 1PM at Rubenstein Arts Center — for tix, see link in bio! taken in Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke University by @corter_pounder

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a year ago

Nine years, 232 pages, and a promise kept
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Three weeks ago, I defended my dissertation after two straight months of writing daily
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There is so much I could say about what this dissertation and writing it have taught me. About how surreal it felt to be studying and writing about the segregationist policies and practices of North Carolina's state officials and local school boards during the era of school degregation in our present moment where modern segregationists are employing the same strategies of racial subjugation with little to no revision...And about the presentday implications and offerings of the radically disruptive actions/ideas of the Black (teenage) young people of the majority-Black Warren County, NC during the transformation of the public education system post-Brown v. Board (a decade before the far more popular environmental justice movement out of the same county in the early 80s)
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For now, I'll just say I'm relieved, proud, and grateful. It took a gang of love and faith to arrive here, and my list of thank you's is long. I would not have made it all these years without the collective prayer, goodwill, the love, and the emotional and financial support of family (especially those who passed during this journey), friends, and community. I grew up knowing that I stand on the shoulders of many. This process taught me anew that I am but "one in the number." So while this Ph.D. is mine, it belongs to all who made my being here possible
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I'm unsure what is "next" in the grand sense, but what is "now" is rest, recharging, and reconnection. (However, ya boi will also be looking for work, so if you see something that you think might be a fit, please send my way!!)

✌🏾🖤
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#yetandstill by @corter_pounder

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a year ago

A Moment V
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Two yrs ago, I began my journey as Poet Laureate for the Town of Chapel Hill - a town in/around which I have spent the bulk of my adult life; where I'd come to experience community for the first time in life after spending my first 24 yrs moving every 2-4 yrs. A town that I first came to know via the insular bubble of a campus where I spent the majority of my undergrad navigating an increasingly intolerable discomfort with a proximity to whiteness to which I had long been accustomed; a town that I left and returned to for some sense of belonging and purpose after a couple of jarring years confronting my own miseducation while helping youth confront their own in a public education system designed to leave children behind; the place where I've spent the past 8 yrs of grad studying/practicing a kind of opposition to the regressive white supremacist culture of my alma mater
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The place where I planted myself in the rich, fertile history and presence of a Black community that insists on living a radical joy and fellowship, refusal and self-governance, in spite of generational divestments and displacements; where I'd bear witness to an enduring beauty that far exceeds anything that can be marketed in University or Visitor Center brochures; where I accessed the stillness needed to hear and heed the ancestral call of this Southern soil and reconnect with my red clay roots
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The past 2 yrs have birthed more gratitude, resiliance, and creativity than I can sum here. I'm humbled by the creative community I've had the privilege of building/arting with. I'm grateful to everyone who pulled up to a reading, workshop, panel, or any gathering I've been a part of. Not sure I'd recommend doing this if youre a late stage doctoral candidate trying to get out of grad school...but I am sure that I'd make the decision again if given the opportunity
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Chapel Hill is a complex place to make politically-socially engaged art that is disinterested in 'progressive' palatability. At the end of this road, I'm proud of what I accomplished with/in community, AND.. that I can say I stood on bidness and put Love at the fore
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V excited to return to being another poet at large
✌🏾🖤 by @corter_pounder

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2 years ago

Last week, we celebrated Cortland Gilliam's (@corter_pounder) work as Chapel Hill Poet Laureate with 15+ local poets at @thecavenc. Inspiring is an understatement ✨

Looking for opportunities to engage in poetry and share your own work? Here are some options throughout the Triangle that Cortland recommends:

Chapel Hill-Carrboro
🔹 @thechimein at @lanzascafe
🔹 @steelstringbrewery open mic nights
🔹 Second Sunday poetry at @flyleafbooks

Hillsborough
🔹 Weave & Spin at Eno Arts Mill (@ocncarts)

Durham
🔹 Poetry After Dark at @missylanesassemblyroom
🔹 Jambalaya Poetry Slam at @haytiheritagecenter

Raleigh
🔹 @citysoulcafe Open Mic at @terminal8bar_lounge
🔹 Paradigm Poetry with @paradigmadozen

Have another resource to recommend?
Drop it in the comments! ⤵️ taken in Chapel Hill, NC by @corter_pounder

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2 years ago