Instagram story viewer> @corter_pounder> Tagged
Cortland Gilliam, PhD(@corter_pounder)'s profile avatar HD Profile

Cortland Gilliam, PhD

@corter_pounder

2.5K
followers
3340
following
Dir of Engagement @carolinaperformingarts, Poet Laureate of CH (2023-2024), Humanities Scholar, Educator. Cultural organizer
more to bare/bear
POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED
carborro music fest and jordan lake
9
Download
I am notorious for being bad at keeping up with the things that have been happening in my life so here’s my attempt to catch you up on the last few months…swipe for your fill .. Painting at the Eno River 60th Anniversary Celebration was such an honor (even despite the rain). Thank you to everyone who came to chat with me and a special thanks to the @enoriver team! We can’t wait to do the final reveal once it is completed! Creating my first sculpture in my career for @townofmorrisvillenc was such an honor and so symbolic as a butterfly. This is kicking off another special project that hasn’t been announced yet but stay tuned 😍 Live painting at the @ncfolkfestival alongside some amazing artists was something I now want to do more! Live painting vibes cont… I supported @peoplessolidarityhub in setting up a community mural for their building and I can’t wait to show you how it turned out! If you’ve been backstage at the @carolinatheatredurham then you know where I am! Cheesin with someone special… Celebrating with @gen.she.rtp ❤️ Need I say more? #iykyk Loved our @gen.she.rtp Exec Board mtg with these amazing girls! Thanks to my friends for helping me paint one of my street murals last month! I couldn’t have finished this project without yall! To my dear @tasha_lm1 your flowers lasted SO LONG! I knew it was because they were from you! CEO Library with @gen.she.rtp ! My Exhibit Artist talk: Between the Lines with @dggallerync Appreciating the soft moments these days… And just a damn good time! Cheers to many more!
6
Download
Thrilled to have celebrated 1 year of ENCOUNTERS FOR THE LIVING AND THE DEAD with @gabbat, @lightseydarst, @corter_pounder, and so many friends! Thanks to everyone who came out tonight--I'm grateful to you all. We're so lucky to live in region with such a vibrant, talented poetry community. Thank you @lettersbookshop for hosting and thank you to @sugar___lumps for the custom cake!
29
Download
How fast a year goes by! I'm reflecting on 1 year since my book release party at Durham's @delafiabar (while having a glass at Delafia!). Over the last 12 months, I've read from ENCOUNTERS FOR THE LIVING AND THE DEAD at 27 events in 14 cities and towns across 5 states--and I'll be reading in at least 2 new cities and 1 new state in the next 6 weeks. I've met so many beautiful poets and poetry lovers along the way. I'm so grateful for the generous support of friends, family, readers, venues, and my editors Han and Amorak at their small-and-mighty press @riverriverbooks. I'm looking forward to celebrating my book's first publication birthday at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, 9/23, in Durham @lettersbookshop. I'll be joined by poets Cortland Gilliam, Lightsey Darst, and Gabrielle Calvocoressi. It's going to be a wonderful evening of poetry. I'll also be reading a few new poems. There'll be a cake from @sugar___lumps and I'll bring some wine I've been saving. Can't wait to celebrate with y'all 💓
15
Download
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. ✨ 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. ✨ 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. ✨ 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
4
Download
Hinds Feet on High Places Theater Production Company proudly presents the stage play Thru a Glass Darkly.
0
Download
Weave and Spin came to a close tonight after four years, and we owe a massive THANK YOU to Morrow Dowdle. Morrow created a literary community at the Eno Arts Mill when we were still fledgling. They brought our area’s most talented writers into our little space, and offered a safe space for countless writers to take the big SCARY leap of reading their work aloud. Our community is better because of you. 🙏🧡🙏🧡🙏 #hillsboroughnc #enoartsmill #artsorange #weaveandspin
3
Download
✨ Welcome to a space where creativity, storytelling, and community come together. The Belonging poetry anthology is the culmination of the Rising Voices Poetry Project (2025–2026), a year-long, grant-funded creative writing and social futuring workshop series for fifth-grade students of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools. Designed and led by @corter_pounder, 2023–2024 Chapel Hill Poet Laureate, with support from Prism Design Lab and Executive Director @heather_lena, this project invited students to reflect on the meaning of belonging through both independent and collaborative poem-writing sessions. Every student wrote their own personal poem about what belonging means to them, then selected a favorite line to help collectively construct a classroom poem. The poems in this collection are those final classroom poems. Each line a distinct voice, quilted together. This work was made possible through the support of the Town of Chapel Hill’s Division of Community Arts & Culture and the Frances R. Dewing Foundation. We are so grateful to the incredible educators, teachers, and administrators of Northside Elementary, Ephesus Elementary, Frank Porter Graham Elementary, Estes Hills Elementary, and Rashkis Elementary. And finally, thank you to the brilliant and visionary fifth graders. Your creativity, honesty, imagination, and willingness to share your voices made this poetry collection possible. We hope you continue to speak up, share your voice, and create a world where everyone can find belonging. 💛 #PrismDesignLab #RisingVoicesPoetryProject #Belonging #YouthVoices #CreativeWriting
1
Download
April is International Poetry Month, and as Poet Laureate of the Town of Chapel Hill, ya boy was (happily) booked and busy! Let’s recap 🗓️ Slide 2: Attendees at “Rough Drafts” - my monthly creative writing and performance workshop at @epiloguebooksch (check us on May 7, 6pm-7pm) 📓 Slide 3: Officiated the wedding of my dear friends, the day one homies, @gorgeouslife & @jupiterhulk 🖤 Slides 4-6: An epic week of mic-rockin with the @unchiphopensemble, and emceeing the annual UNC Science Expo in collaboration with @moreheadplanetarium 🎶🚀💫🔭 Slide 7: Dropping a few bars at the Poet Laureate selection event at Carrboro HS - shoutout @chspoeticjusticeleague 🎤 Slide 8: Received at proclamation at the monthly Town Council meeting, officially declaring April, Poetry Month, in Chapel Hill 🏛️ Slides 9-10: Facilitated a youth poetry workshop for K-6 graders at the @_hargraves_216 👨🏾‍🏫 Slides 11-12: Signing books and mic-rockin at the CHCCS District Poet Laureate ceremony (congrats @whaapenned) 📚 ✍🏾 Slides 13-14: For their capstone project, the students in my class (MUSC 150: Intro to Hip-hop) curated a pop-up hip-hop museum! 🎧💿🎹 Slide 15: Ongoing collab with my good sis, and fellow Poet Laureate (Carrboro), @theamandashow12 - teaching songwriting at Orange County Correctional Center! 🎵📝 Slides 16-17: Facilitated a teen poetry workshop and dedicated this mural at the CHPL, featuring their original lines of poetry (not pictured: all the pizza we consumed that day) 🎨📓🍕 Slides 18-19: Hosted our signature event, The Poet is a Verb, which was punctuated by two dope features, @lew__actually and @jamessolomon___ , an appearance from my Poet Laureate predecessor, @corter_pounder and an open mic list, 21-names long! 🎤🔥 Slide 20: My muse and inspiration; the light you see when you look at me. Without @drlnwestlivingston and the babies, these expressions are merely words on a page. They are my call-to-action 🥰
11
Download
I am beyond excited about this event on the art of memory and repair - we'll think together with an amazing line-up of speakers about how British and US institutions can reckon meaningfully with their complex pasts and build a reparative present, and end with poetry from heart-opening, heart-healing poets Anthony Joseph and Cortland Gilliam. I have loved Joseph's work ever since I heard him read from Sonnets for Albert - "When I hear my father dead/I flew ten hours into the sun". I'm in awe of Gilliam's interweaving of politics and art, his work on and through cultural space-taking and cultural space-making. And we'll hear from them both! After we've got our thoughts flowing with Eva Namusoke, Liberty Patterson, Michael Anson, Mishka Sinha, Alex von Tunzelmann, Richard Drayton, Brian Maina, Catherine Hall, Stephen Mullen, Sara Smith, and Chris Jeppesen. The event is hosted by King's Past, which I direct alongside Erika Melek Delgado at King's College London, and where we're working collaboratively nationally and internationally to reflect on and develop methods of memory and repair. Come! The registration link is in slide 3. I've been thinking about statues - and Alex will be talking about these ✨️ - and about what Gary Younge says about not wanting to set a painful past in stone ✨️ - and how much I love walking past Veronica Ryan's Windrush sculpture, the breadfruit and the custard apple and the soursop, on my way to Hackney Central. @corter_pounder @anthony.joseph_poet @alexvontunzelmann @kingsartshums @kings_college_london @kingspastkcl @kclhistory @garyyounge #veronicaryan #memory #artasmemory #windrush
8
Download
Bricks as Memory Tuesday, April 7 at 11:30am to 1pm The Institute for Arts and Humanities at UNC (Hyde Hall) ***meeting point: The Old Well in front of South Building at UNC*** Register at link in bio! This 90-minute program will engage the scope of Culture Mill’s five-year residency with Southern Futures at Carolina Performing Arts in both academic and poetic language. In it, speakers will contextualize an iterative process that has engaged a racialized history on UNC Chapel Hill’s campus, and how the complex intersections of power and place continue to land on our bodies today. Through reflections on performances of Eclipse and processes such as the Social Geographies Seminar and the Old Well Practice, we will explore ways in which artistic interventions on university campuses open new pathways for experiential learning and knowing to be an agent of change. Presenters and facilitators include Dr. Elizabeth Olson, Professor of Geography and Global Studies and IAH Interim Director; Culture Mill artists-in-residence at Carolina Performing Arts; and Dr. Cortland Gilliam, former Chapel Hill poet laureate. This program is free, but registration is requested. (Lunch included for participants who register before March 24th) Register at Link in Bio!
0
Download
North Carolina, you owe us nothing 🩵 RECONSTRUCTING is on the road & we kicked off with our first stop in the South @carolinaperformingarts last month. The TEAM had a timeee, celebrating birthdays, long-awaited reunions & SO much resonance with our audience members. It means the world to us to bring this work to the communities grappling with slavery’s historical lineage—to perform, connect & collectively reimagine our future. It’s another standing O for the books! Next up: RECONSTRUCTING at @hopkinscenter April 2-3, 2026!
3
Download
back to up