Judy Jordan returned to her native North Carolina to deliver award-winning poetry and inspirational messages to Greensboro students. Jordan gave two poetry readings last week, on Wednesday, March 28, at the UNCG faculty center and Thursday, March 29, in the Founders Gallery. Both readings were followed by book signings. Jordan also attended a poetry workshop at UNCG on Wednesday and a tea-and-talk meeting, funded by Guilford’s Women’s Studies program, at the Greenleaf on Thursday.

Assistant Professor of English Heather Hayton met Jordan at California State University – San Marcos in 2000-2001, while serving on a committee that hired Jordan as a faculty member. Hayton worked alongside the UNCG Creative Writing Department and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Academic Dean Adrienne Israel to get the readings funded.

Hayton introduced Jordan to the audience at Thursday night’s reading, saying, “I find her to be one of the truest, kindest persons, filled with the most integrity that I’ve met in my whole life. Her passion just continues to inspire me and her poems have made me a much better person just for the reading of them . Her first book, ‘Carolina Ghost Woods,’ was honored with several national and state awards, and it remains one of the most amazing texts I have ever read.”

Jordan began the Thursday night reading with poems from “Carolina Ghost Woods,” which includes autobiographical accounts of growing up in a family of poor sharecroppers in Marshville, N.C., about 125 miles from Greensboro near the North Carolina/South Carolina border. She warmly refers to it as “The hometown of Randy Travis.”

“I spent three years entering (‘Carolina Ghost Woods’) into, and not winning, first book contests,” Jordan said, “but then it won the Walt Whitman, which is considered the biggest, most important first book contest in the country. It was the one book chosen out of 1,369 entries. Then, it went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, a prize right up there with the Pulitzer and National Book Award. So perseverance and hope are good for something.”

The selections from her first book were intense and harrowing narratives about the violence that surrounded her as a child, including her father’s drunken bouts of violence, which would force her to run away to live outside for days at a time; a cousin’s career as a mob hit man; and life with “the lover of my father, one of her four men, all buried – suicide, murder, drink, again murder. It was after the second one that she sat stock-still and silent, four years in the asylum. Now she walks the road all day, picking up Cracker Jack trinkets to give to children brave enough to approach her.”

“I like the first book, it’s a little bit darker,” said CCE sophomore Matthew Fitzgerald. “It’s different (from) what I’m usually listening to or reading.”

Jordan left North Carolina in 1980 to attend the University of Virginia, where she earned her undergraduate degree and later a Master of Fine Arts in poetry. Since 1980, she has only returned to North Carolina to visit family, she said, and this is her first visit since 2000.

Jordan continued with her third book, tentatively titled “Enter the Garden,” about two years that she spent in a state of “semi-homelessness,” living in a greenhouse with the roof half caved in.

These selections included dark discussions about poverty and the environmental effects of development, but at one point, Jordan assured the audience, “There are a few optimistic poems in this book, but I’m not going to read them to you.”

She concluded the reading with selections from her second book, “60 Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance: A Poem,” a character-driven, explicit, and partially fictionalized account of three years she spent in off-and-on homelessness in Charlottesville, Va.

“Many people would argue that ‘You shouldn’t write poetry about anything other than happy, beautiful subjects,'” Jordan said. “‘If you’re going to write about homelessness, write an essay.’ But I wanted to get into that argument, that conversation, about ‘What is poetry?'”

“The most interesting thing about her,” said junior Lehn Robinson, “is the question mark that is the source of her education and where she came out of, because she’s clearly incredibly accomplished, and there’s just a huge wealth of her past that she’s drawing on.”

Jordan now lives completely off-grid in a Thoreau-style cabin that she built herself in the middle of the Shawnee National Forest and is working on a creative non-fiction book about her experiences there. She teaches poetry at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale and is a vegetarian who spends her free time writing and rescuing pug dogs.