2023-615-E-Arts Commission-Liza Wolff-Francis-2023-24 Arts Grant

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Artist Experience Nerys Levy has been involved with the issue of climate awareness for the past fifteen years.She has travelled to and worked in both the Antarctic and the Norwegian Arctic.In 2010 she participated in a six month long Polar project with middle school students from Mc Dougle School, Carrboro at the Carrboro Branch Library. The students, after making Polar art work and sculptures, at the end of the project stated that they felt like stake holders in the planet’s future. In 2011 Levy was a participant in the six month long “Ice Counterpoint” exhibition of Polar art and related programming at UNC’s Global Education Center which addressed the importance of the Polar region’s to Earth’s climate stability.The project reached out to 18 local schools and was effective in heightening the issue of climate awareness in young people and the UNC community at a time when there were many doubters that Earth’s climate was in a state of rapid change. Nerys Levy’s Polar content on her website neryslevy.com is being promoted as an important educational tool for teaching climate awareness to children by both the UK Times Educational Supplement and also by Disney’s education platform Disney Penguins.Nerys Levy is committed to working globally with youth on the issue of climate awareness and change, is a qualified teacher and is responsible for FRANK Gallery’s youth education initiatives. Cortland Gilliam is a poet, cultural organizer, and doctoral candidate in Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His scholarship explores histories of school discipline and youth activism, including a publication on media erasure of Black youth climate activists in Ethics and Education. W ithin community, he serves as Co-Chair of the Board of Directors at the Marian Cheek Jackson Center, a nonprofit making and preserving local history in Chapel Hill and Carrboro's Black neighborhoods. Cortland's poetry has been published in Gulfstream Magazine and the Triangle Poetry Twenty-Twenty-One anthology, and he serves as Chapel Hill's second Poet Laureate. His fusion of the creative and political has extended beyond poetry to include participation in a nine-month performative “Noose Protest” demonstration, co-curating a collaborative exhibition entitled #BlackOutLoudUNC at the Center for the Study of the American South, and co-producing a documentary exploring Black student experiences of belonging at UNC-Chapel Hill. Liza W olff-Francis is the 8th Poet Laureate of Carrboro, North Carolina and she has an M.F.A. in Creative W riting from Goddard College. She has an ekphrastic poem published in Austin’s Blanton Art Museum and was co- director for the 2014 Austin International Poetry Festival. She has taught writing workshops for over a decade. Her essay “Exploring Ecopoetry: Changing Definitions” was published by Valparaiso University. She currently facilitates ecopoetry workshops in Carrboro. Her writing has been widely anthologized and her work has most recently appeared in The Phare, Silver Birch Press, W ild Roof Journal, SLAB, and eMerge magazine. She has also written poetry book reviews that have been published on Adroit, Compulsive Reader, and LitPub. She also works as a Spanish speaking clinical social worker. DocuSign Envelope ID: FC5FFA2D-685C-4B93-BE20-4DA20E469B1B