Tagged: Poetry

  Tanya Olson will tell you that being an eight-year-old child in the world allows you a lot of room to be whoever and whatever you want. You can be a whale, a man, a spaceship, and few will tell you otherwise. After that age though, the feeling doesn't necessarily go away. She explores that desire to transform in her first book of poems, "Boyishly" (YesYes Books, 2013). Tanya Olson is a poet and an English professor at Vance-Granville Community College.

Fred Moten grew up in a home and in a time where revolution was not portrayed as a romantic dream for the future, but a vital necessity for survival. He was raised in Las Vegas in the late '60s and '70s by a family who understood the need for change.

This week the North Carolina Senate voted along party lines to repeal the Racial Justice Act. Also in the legislation are measures designed to restart executions, which have been unofficially on hold in the state since 2006.

Critics contend that eliminating the Racial Justice Act will prevent those unfairly sentenced to death because of racial bias from getting justice. More than 150 people in the state are awaiting execution.

Republican Senator Thom Goolsby of New Hanover County sponsored the legislation repealing the Racial Justice Act, and he said on The State of Things that the Act isn’t necessary.

The Louder Than a Bomb Poetry Slam competition started in Chicago in 2001. Inspired by the competition and a documentary about it, local group Poet.she Female Performing Arts & Spoken Word decided to bring the competition to Greensboro.