CITY OF BIRMINGHAM POET LAUREATE
ANNOUNCING SALAAM GREEN AS THE CITY OF BIRMINGHAM POET LAUREATE
The City of Birmingham is pleased to announce the appointment of Salaam Green as the inaugural 2024-2025 City of Birmingham Poet Laureate. This prestigious position recognizes Ms. Green’s outstanding contributions to the literary arts and her commitment to fostering a deeper appreciation for poetry within our community.
Selected through a rigorous nomination and evaluation process, Green emerged as the ideal candidate to serve as Birmingham’s Poet Laureate. As the founder and director of The Literary Healing Arts and a Road Scholar for the Alabama Humanities Alliance, she has spent over 16 years working as an arts educator, healer, and community leader in Birmingham. Green is a published author whose work has been featured in the book Peaches the Perfect Poet, and the Alabama Arts Journal.
Speaking requests
If you’d like to invite The City of Birmingham’s Poet Laureate, Salaam Green, to speak or perform at your event, please fill out the request form below. All requests will be sent directly to Salaam, as Create Birmingham does not manage her schedule. To ensure availability, we encourage you to submit your request well in advance of your event date.
2024 Programming overview
- Viva Health (January)
- 205 Day (February)
- “With Love, For Grief” Sculpture Dedication (February)
- Selma Jubilee Bridge Crossing (March)
- Faith and Politics (March)
- BPL Bards and Brews Poetry Showcase (April)
- Poetry at the Museum! (April)
- Poetry to the People: A Community Event Featuring Birmingham’s Poet Laureate Salaam Green (April)
- 2024 Mainstreet Now Conference (May)
- University of North Dakota Early Childhood Education Literacy Conference (June)
- 2024 Poet Fellowship Initiative (June – July)
- PEN America: Poets Across Lines (Aug.- Dec.)
- Vulcan Back to School Reading Rally (August)
- Arts Collab Teaching Artist Training (August)
- Birmingham Food + Culture Festival (September)
- Sloss Furnaces Artist in Residence Showcase (September)
- City of Birmingham “Pink Parade” (October)
- Titusville Is Here Community Day (October)
- Birmingham Arts Journal Poetry Feature (October)
- 205 and Mental Health Awareness with Councilor LaTonya Tate and Birmingham City Schools (October)
- Leaves of Poetry (November)
- The Threshold Center St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church (Nov.)
- Mid South Sculptures Conference (November)
- UAB Arts in Medicine 10 Year Anniversary (November)
- Reimagine the Institute: BCRI’s 32nd Anniversary (November)
- Literacy Council of Central Alabama (November – December)
- Greensboro Christmas Parade (December)Community Teen Summit (September)
- Beloved Community Church (September)
What Must We Do “Birmingham”
Salaam Green, Inaugural Poet Laureate,
City of Birmingham Mayoral Proclamation of Poet Laureate, City Council, 2024
What must we do to elevate the human race.
What must we do to eliminate violence, poverty, and suffering.
What must we do-Birmingham
We must activate acts of agape love and moments of radical resistance…more joy.
We must walk the streets and recognize the beauty therein, the progress, the histories that tell our stories of forgiveness an unrelenting legacy.
What must we do-Birmingham
We must take the hands of our youth and guide their hearts into spaces of renewal and transformation.
We must blaze a path towards solidarity, unity, and repair. We must become the pathfinders that light the roads toward recovery and kindle the fire of change.
We must open up the book of love and read each chapter carefully page by page line by line verse by verse.
We must digest the words of our forefathers the cries of our little girls the laughter of our critics and dare to write our own script.
What must we do-Birmingham
We must become the Birmingham we wish to see, the Birmingham we wish to be.
We must carry wisdom to the ones that refuse mediocrity and futility. We must grasp hope by the strength of each woven sentence. We must speak up.
We must raise our voices.
We must rise… Birmingham
We must work.
We must build.
We must be brave.
We must remember that we are the caretakers of King’s courage the catalyst of peace the protectors of justice the genesis of civil rights the revelation of a mighty south.
What must we do-Birmingham
We must empty our pockets of complaints and fear. We must take great concern and wrap our arms around the giants of greatness.
We must embrace that a new day has begun.
We must believe.
We must be the Birmingham we were birthed to be.
We must remind the world and the nation that Birmingham’s beautiful spine shall never bend or break.
We must perfect our posture with an unmovable spirit.
What must we do-Birmingham
We must recognize we are significant and propel ourselves forward with dignity and align ourselves with rest and resiliency.
We must heal together and teach a world how to heal together. We must call forth and gather each citizen young and old to sit in the chair of champions and to create their own destiny.
What must we do-Birmingham
We must be the Birmingham where people were born to be free the Birmingham we wish to see
the Birmingham we know and trust we all can and desire to be.
This initiative is in partnership with the City of Birmingham and funded by the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Birmingham City Council’s Cultural Arts Committee.