West End Poetry Festival Preview

Kinship: The Work of Making Room

When I began my term as Carrboro Poet Laureate, I knew I wanted to bring poetry more fully into the public life of the town. What I have learned this year is that the deeper work is not simply giving poems a stage. It is building the conditions in which people can recognize that their voices belong to a living literary community.

That is what I hear in this year’s West End Poetry Festival theme, “Kinship: Community & Belonging.” Kinship asks us to think beyond the mythology of the solitary writer and toward the relationships that make creative life possible: the person who invites you into the room, the elder who sends an opportunity onward, the young writer who discovers that someone is listening, the stranger who hears a poem and recognizes part of their own life inside it.

Throughout my laureateship, I have been thinking about literary community as an ecosystem. Through projects like Sweetshrub Reading Series, Backyard Writing Revival, and Theory Out the Trunk, I have become increasingly interested in what happens when writers have places not only to perform finished work, but to gather, experiment, eat, learn, publish, and be witnessed.

West End gives us an opportunity to practice that kind of literary life in public. Across three days, young poets, established writers, neighbors, teachers, families, and first-time readers will share space with one another. The festival is not simply a collection of readings. It is an invitation to imagine poetry as part of how a community knows itself, and kinship as something we create through the practice of making room.

Editor's note: Website text formatting restrictions limit depiction of the poems as the authors intended. Please find the print layout file, which shows the poems as they were designed, at the bottom of this page.

Kashiana Singh

“Steps to Make a Home”

Excerpt: Step 5

Step 5:
Open the windows.

Let the fried fish, herbs, oil
slip through the windows—

our private feast
becoming the neighborhood’s air.

Let a child carry
three languages into the street,

each word a small border
crossed without a passport.

Let our quarrels, recipes,
prayers, music, mourning

spill past the threshold

what we keep inside
becoming what the outside
learns to hear.

The country may ask
for my allegiance.

But I remember
another kind of belonging

Will you sit beside me?

Will you pass the bread?

Will you remember
whose hand held yours

when you first learned
to cross the road?

Before we knew
the names of countries,

we knew

the warmth of a hand,

the weight of a body
beside us

Perhaps this is the immigrant’s
strange mathematics of home

the periodic table
we keep trying to assemble—

one foot in the ancestral garment,
one in the unfamiliar street,

a private table
inside a public world,

the self forever translating,
never entirely translated.

And still—

someone is frying fish.

my loud ancestors

are gathering

their chants as dense

as the rivers 

I left behind

The door is always unlocked.

There is always
one more place
at the table

 Publication note: An earlier version of “Steps to Make a Home” appeared in USAWA in 2021. Kashiana Singh confirms reprint rights and permission to use an excerpt from this version. 

Charlyse Campbell

Her

By Charlyse Campbell

I look to my left

There's a girl with skin like mine

Her hair is thicker than my thighs

The curls are so tight

You can't even see them

That girl looks like me

There aren't many girls who look like me

When I look to my right

I usually see girls with fair skin, hair so thin it falls, and no definite curls

Those girls don't look like me

The girls of creamy shades understand each other more

I feel out of place, uncomfortable around them, and in my own skin

I don't usually see girls like me

But, when I look in front of me, I see a girl

Her skin is the shade of caramel

Darker than her grandpa's, but lighter than her grandmas

She has a mix of dark, thick, curly hair

When I look at the girl in the mirror

I see myself

Caramel skin, Dark, thick, curly hair

A smile grows on my face

The thought that God created us fearfully and wonderfully

It makes my heart race

It gives me appreciation for my beautiful body

I must respect the temple given to me

Because I am a blessing, and you are too

Publication note: Charlyse Campbell approved publication through Vianna Fornville. This will be the poem’s first publication.

Seedling Day Poem 2026

Excerpt from the collaborative community poem

MOTHER NATURE …

hands us all the key to her garden

which bears

so many reasons to be grateful

with worms to find

and strawberries to pick

with air to breathe and food to eat

she shelters the world,

from busy bees to proud oak trees

The meteors shower her in affection

with a veil of flowers

The rainbows crown her in devotion

with colors of the wind

Mother Nature weaves a basket from sweeping sweetgrass

harvesting freedom

happiness

love

peace

joy

the fruits of the spirit

She gives me

a place to be

who I really am.

Credit: Created collaboratively by children participating in Carrboro Farmers’ Market Seedling Day with students from the Carrboro High Poetic Justice League. Alice Stuckey will read from the poem at the West End Poetry Festival.

Grey Brown  

The Scots 

My great aunts 

live ditch-bound in the county, 

outbuildings sagging, 

a neon Budweiser sign always lit. 

I like their whistling kettle 

and the tea cakes, 

the clutter, their chatter, 

the sofa on the porch, 

their jokes that make no sense 

but keep my mother laughing. 

I admire most their birdhouses, 

dangling white gourds 

twirling above forgotten fields, 

dry, empty globes 

suspended six in a row, 

angled against the sky, 

unlikely totems,

livelier than any cross, 

eyeless, their round mouths 

open, wordless, calling.

This poem was published in her fourth collection, Communion, from Red Hawk Press in April 2026, and also appeared in Triggerfish Review. 

Mariah M.

Said and Done
After June, After Sonia, After Nikki, After You

You... Here...
You... Here...
You. Here.
You, here

you hear
the first time your name spoken / crashing upon Afric shore / remembering
the taste of holy ground / within its waves / the first time

it was / heard / was as a current underneath
the wings of a bird, flying / with a knowing but / with no specific destination
the first time / it was / seen

was upon a thorn of / a rose on kept bush / on someone’s plot of stolen land
you were part / of a garden that grew / out of mourning /
and yet / still / grew

you, here
you, in place
you, place, you

d i s p l a c e d

you / who found a home in the sky / that made flight for
another possible / you are / then and now
you / was and will be / you

you possible being / you being here / you being
you being flower / being air / being crash onto hallowed ground
being

holy
being / holy /
being holy / being / holy /

O, divine one, know this
your name will / never go unsaid / for it is in one of
nature’s / original / tongues / you will

continue / to be / spoken of even /
when those who / remain / cannot /
or could / never / understand

Naomi Hirsch

Shapes and Sizes

Beauty poisons any person who lives
And kills those who make it their world
Now I know my hair comes in many shapes and sizes
And I love all of them
But my favorite way to wear it is out and poufy
And I’ve learned how to tell people no
Because it’s my hair, for goodness sake
When I was younger, I wanted long, straight hair
Hair that didn’t twist
Hair that didn’t shrink
Hair that didn’t pull or frizz or tangle, for goodness sake
My words were clear, but my intentions didn’t match
And I was too small to know the bigger story

The first time I straightened my hair, I cried
Because I thought it would be straight forever
The girl who once wanted her curly hair gone
Now vowed to never lose it
I felt older with my hair long and straight
But I found that the strands were too loose and flew everywhere
And I liked my curly hair better
As I got older, I realized that beauty
Comes in many shapes and sizes
I shook my hair from side to side and watched my beads fly in circles
So many shapes and sizes and colors and
I wasn’t the only one infatuated with my hair
And I was too shy to tell people no when
Black beauty turned from a ghost town to a museum, and I became an artifact

To be Black and female is to live at a toxic cross-section
The air can be hard to breathe, but my lungs have adapted
And my voice grows stronger every day