Chapel Hill residents of all ages and backgrounds are coming together to create a community mixtape.
The project, “Talk of the Town: Chapel Hill Community Mixtape,” is a creative writing, performance and recording series created as a way for residents to express passion for Chapel Hill. Selected contributors will attend writing workshops and recording sessions, and then a collaborative mixtape will be produced and released later this year.
The project is being led by Chapel Hill Poet Laureate Donovan Livingston and is sponsored by the Chapel Hill Public Library, Chapel Hill Community Arts & Culture and the UNC Department of Music.
Livingston began the mixtape project as a way to blend his love of hip-hop and spoken word.
“I think a lot of what I’ve tried to do throughout my journey as an artist is sort of bring those worlds together, the poet and the hip-hop emcee,” Livingston said. “And so I really like blurring the lines between those genres.”
To find participants, the Town’s Community Arts & Culture division launched a webpage asking residents to answer a prompt with an original poem about Chapel Hill and their love for the town. The applicants varied in age, from around 14 to 80 years old.
“I think what happens too often is when we think Chapel Hill, we only think about it in terms of the University,” Livingston, who is also UNC’s director of College Thriving and a teaching assistant professor in the Department of Music, said. “And I think this project is an opportunity for us to remember where we members of the University are a part of a much larger ecosystem here in Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Orange County more broadly.”
Judy McCord, a participating poet, wrote her poem about the Seymour Center. The center was a place for McCord to connect with other residents after moving to Chapel Hill in the heat of the pandemic in 2020.
McCord always had a passion for poetry but has never had any works published. She said she has enjoyed the process of writing and recording the poems for the mixtape.
“The communities are kind of overlapping and separate and distinct, and it’s a brilliant mix of people and places, and it’s just a brilliant place to have a mixtape that talks to that,” McCord said.
Matthew G. Taylor, another poet participating in the mixtape, shared his appreciation for Chapel Hill in a similar way. Taylor was born in UNC Hospitals in 1992, grew up in Warren County and applied to just one college: UNC.
As an undergraduate student, Taylor was actively involved with poetry and spoken word organizations, including Ebony Readers/Onyx Theatre and UNC Wordsmiths. For the mixtape, Taylor answered a prompt asking about the history of Chapel Hill. He wrote about the businesses and neighborhoods that he remembered from when he was attending UNC.
“I want people to understand that Chapel Hill was built by a diverse landscape of people,” Taylor said.
Through contributors like McCord and Taylor, the mixtape captures different experiences of Chapel Hill, forming a perspective that reflects Livingston’s goal of showing Chapel Hill as more than just a college town, but as a place that is shaped by many generations and communities.
The mixtape has yet to be finished, but it is scheduled to be released on digital streaming platforms around November.
“The arts have a way of thrusting people together who might have otherwise not been,” Livingston said. “And that is the beauty in all of this, right?”