Governor Cooper visited Kinston Tuesday, June 12th to discuss his new initiative Hometown Strong, which partners six rural communities across North Carolina with state government to partner on community economic development projects. The role of arts in recreating Kinston/Lenoir County's economy was a focus of his visit.
smART Kinston recently received a great feature from the Triangle area News & Observer. The article focuses on smART artists Seraphim Smith and Jacob Herrmann, as well as smART Chairman Stephen Hill.
Christopher Everett spent a weekend in the Arts & Cultural District as part of a special free screening of his critically acclaimed documentary Wilmington on Fire on April 15 at Neuse Regional Library. Everett is a native of Laurinburg and wrote about his time in Lenoir County and how Kinston could be a model for rural placemaking in places like his hometown.
By Christopher Everett
Coming to Kinston, North Carolina this past weekend was an eye-opening experience for me on so many levels. When you think of Rural America, you think of the countryside, farming, manufacturing and poverty. The one thing that never comes to mind when thinking about Rural America is cultural arts. Smart Kinston in Kinston, North Carolina is setting a great example and leading the way towards a new vision for rural towns in the form of creating cultural arts districts.
By Emily Sides
SmART Writer-in-Residence Emily Sides first learned about the white supremacist-led coupdetat in 1898 Wilmington at a March 29, 2016 screening of “Wilmington on Fire” at Goldsboro’s Paramount Theater and made it her goal to bring the award-winning documentary and its director, Christopher Everett, to Kinston this spring.
Everett will be in Kinston’s Arts & Cultural District this weekend for a free screening of “Wilmington on Fire” documentary at 3 p.m. on Saturday, April 15 at the Neuse Regional Library at 510 N. Queen St through a residency with SmART Kinston.
By Emily Sides
About 125 Rochelle Middle School students participated in a poetry presentation ceremony Friday with visiting poet and teaching artist Glenis Redmond.
Redmond worked with the students for two weeks earlier in the school year and returned for the publication of the poetry anthology and celebration of the student’s work. Each participating student also received a copy of the their poetry book ‘Bad and Beautiful: An Anthology of Poems by Rochelle Middle School.’
At the ceremony, two students from each grade read their poems aloud on stage, including seventh grade Mahoganee Williams who read her poem “Life is Bad for Us is All I Hear.”
“I do remember the time you became a poet,” Redmond said to the audience and specifically Williams. “Because I was right there when you became a poet.”
