Griot & Grey Owl | Friday, November 13-Sunday, November 15 | RTP
Finding and nurturing the places where arts and community intersect is nothing new for spouses Khalisa and Eric Thompson.
This weekend, November 13-15, will see the lively fourth installment of the Griot & Grey Owl Black Southern Writers’ Conference, the event the pair co-founded in 2022. Based at RTP, the writing conference provides community, training, and performance opportunities for working writers and, increasingly, the readers who enjoy their work.
This year, Khalisa expects around 300 people to come through the event, 200 of them ticketed attendees, to learn from speakers like headliner Danez Smith, a decorated poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist. Saturday and Sunday’s events are reserved for BIPOC writers, the community that Griot & Grey Owl exists to incubate; Friday’s programming is both free and open for anyone to attend, with events like Smith’s keynote and panels on Afrofuturism and running an arts business.
But even before the two got the conference off the ground in Durham, they were building community in the places they lived. They first met through the poetry scene that swirled around NC AT&T, while living in Greensboro, where they first put down literary roots—though poetry slams also took them across the country.
In 2020, they moved to Durham, where Eric had been involved in the Bull City Slam Team.
“When we got here, we were like, uh oh, where is the community that we were coming for?” Khalisa Thompson said on a recent phone call. “We came here for something, not realizing that the pandemic shut everything down. So we decided to do something about it.”
The Thompsons started with virtual poetry slams, one of which lasted for 24 hours and went viral. Khalisa asked their community what things should look like after the pandemic and went viral all over again.
“I was like, ‘Hey guys, I’m a black writer stepping out of the slam world into the gray area. I’m not a professor anymore. I’m not a slam poet anymore. Where is my community?’” She said, of a post she made on Twitter. “I was like, ‘Do you feel like you have the same problem?’”
The answer to that question, it turned out, was an emphatic “yes.”
Duke University hosted the first year of the conference, with the Thompsons securing some of the biggest names in poetry, like Terrance Hayes, to fill the speaker’s docket. This year, the Thompsons have secured partnerships with dozens of internationally recognized academic and arts organizations and hired a staff.
But over the years, the couple has learned that growth doesn’t always mean more. Khalisa emphasized her excitement about the ways the conference is becoming more accessible and localized: All events are based at one facility this year, and roughly half the tickets have scholarship assistance.
One major goal they have with Griot & Grey Owl is breaking down divisions amongst BIPOC writers—largely between academic and artistic practitioners. Khalisa, who studied this divide in graduate school at Queens University Charlotte, was perfectly positioned to take it on.
“Because of years of white supremacy, academia and institutions have taught us that those two worlds should stay separate,” she said. “That if you are a community person that got no formal education, you are not invited into the academic sphere of highbrow art. And that is bullshit.”
They want connections to form in both directions. It’s important to the Thompsons to elevate writers who might not have academic credentials, and equally important to help academics remain integrated into their community.
As organizers, they do their best to be responsive to the general atmosphere in planning. Each conference has programming designed around helping writers with four major pillars: craft, career, culture, and community.
“We’re the only space that is providing what we call ‘the holisticness of an artist,’” Khalisa said. “We tackle what we believe to be the holistic nature—the body, mind, soul, spirit—of the artist, because we believe that’s how arts thrive.”
“We tackle what we believe to be the holistic nature—the body, mind, soul, spirit—of the artist, because we believe that’s how arts thrive.”
Khalisa rae thompson,
co-founder, griot & Grey Owl
Part of that sensitivity to community and atmosphere means finding a balance between protecting space for BIPOC writers and sharing their writing and wisdom with a wider readership.
“We believe in the sacred space of having things be just safe spaces for Black folks,” Khalisa said. “But, if our mission is to bring awareness to Black Southern books, storytellers, and artistry, we can’t fully realize that mission unless it’s accessible to all communities.”
At the end of the day, Khalisa hopes the event inspires even more writing that attendees can then come back and celebrate next year.
“Whether you’re a writer or a book lover or somebody that doesn’t even feel confident enough to call themselves a writer yet, I hope people get a renewed sense of passion and inspiration around the things that they love,” she said. “We hope that the energy is infectious because right now we know it’s very daunting for a lot of people.”
“Some folks think that it’s a luxury to do what you love,” she continued. “But we want people to fully lean into that it’s a necessity, as well, to create and be a creator.”
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