Meet Gary Phillips, Carrboro’s town poet laureate.
Phillips was appointed poet laureate in 2016, and has accepted the job through June 2018. His responsibilities include organizing the West End Poetry Festival in Carrboro, and leading weekly meetings of the Carrboro Poet’s Council. The Town of Carrboro has weekly meetings that Phillips decided to present poems at as well.
“My charge was to bring poetry into the public life of Carrboro, so I’ve taken that really really seriously and it’s been a lot of fun and a lot of work,” Phillips said.
Daniel Mayer, ArtsCenter representative, said he thinks highly of Phillips and is excited that he's the poet laureate.
“I’ve attended Carrboro town meetings where he has read poetry and he was very insightful, and is very talented as a poet also,” Mayer said.
Phillips has been writing poetry since he was 17 years old, and has been writing since he was 11. He said it was hard growing up in Polk County, NC where he wasn't accepted because of his social and political views.
“My community rejected me pretty heavily, it wasn’t much because of my shyness, but it was the other," he said. "I entered the civil rights movement when I was 17, and I was an outcast. It was really because I was an intellectual, so you might as well chalk that up to poetry.”
He received the Morehead-Cain scholarship to attend UNC-Chapel Hill in 1972, but halfway into his junior year, he left UNC to pursue other endeavors.
“I felt that school was heading me toward a life I didn’t want," Phillips said. "So, it was a good decision for me to quit school. I became an entrepreneur; I did a lot of traveling. I just needed a break from the direction I felt school was pushing me,” he said.
