Event Celebrates New Austin Poet Laureate Program
KB Brookins and Amanda Johnston on what it means to be a poetry city
By Cy White, Fri., Sept. 6, 2024
In a turn of the quill, 2024 Texas Poet Laureate Amanda Johnston writes, “we needed to see what was within: the microscopic/ language of platelets, bodies fused together” (“Love is a Bloody Thing in the Dark”). This need to interrogate the inner self and its relationship with other selves encapsulates the spirit of Austin’s inaugural poet laureate program kickoff party. Dubbed “Austin Is a Poem,” the Sept. 7 event in the Central Library special events center will reflect Austin’s creative core, with readings from talented local orators, including award-winning multihyphenate art-ivist Ebony Stewart, 2019 Texas Poet Laureate Carrie Fountain, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner Roger Reeves, and William Carlos Williams Award winner Jennifer Chang. The event also features special guest appearances from four esteemed Texas poets laureate: Aris Kian (Houston), Mag Gabbert (Dallas), Eddie Vega (San Antonio), and, of course, Johnston – the first Black woman from Texas to hold the state poet laureate title, and only the eighth poet from the Austin area.
For those interested in tossing their art in the ring, the event will also be an opportunity to learn about the application process to become the city’s first official poet laureate. Though the state of Texas has a prolific history of honoring poetry, the city of Austin only recently established its own adult poet laureate program this May. (The city already has an established youth poet laureate program, a joint venture between the Library Foundation and the National Youth Poet Laureate Program.) This is a fact Johnston credits to another great proponent of the literary arts: writer, visual artist, and activist KB Brookins.
“Especially after other major cities in the state – Houston, Dallas, San Antonio – all have poets laureate,” Johnston says, “for Austin being this progressive arts and culture city, that we didn’t have a poet laureate was noticeable.”
Brookins did their own research into adult literacy rates in Austin, and the results provided further impetus for the creation of a program that could enlist someone whose entire career is about literary expansion. They worked with creatives and legislative authorities alike to make their vision for this program come to fruition.
“I started talking to my city councilor, Miss Vanessa Fuentes,” Brookins says. “I started a petition and got more than 200 signatures, including all of the state poets laureate for the past three or four years. Different city poets laureate in different cities in Texas, as well as the whole Arts Commission signed that petition. Then I, alongside Mike Henry – who’s the [executive director] of Austin Poetry Slam – as well as Vanessa Fuentes, were able to put forth a resolution about starting a poet laureate program. ... The hope is that we have our first city poet laureate by April 2025.”
For Johnston, the birth of this program is fitting for a creative hive like the Lone Star capital. “Of course, Austin is a poem because it is made up, line by line, word by word, by the people,” she says. “Every single existence and person and place and sound and smell and energy of Austin creates the vibrancy of the great poem that we’re writing together.”
“Oftentimes, people are not thinking of Austin as a poetry city,” Brookins says. “I really am looking forward to amplifying and letting people know they don’t have to go somewhere else to feel like they have a poetry community, or they don’t have to go other places to get quality and exciting programming in the realms of poetry. They don’t have to go somewhere else to learn poetry. We have those things here.”
AUSTIN IS A POEM: The Austin Poet Laureate Program Kickoff Party
Saturday 7, Central Library
