Support Griot and Grey
Owl Blk Southern Writers
Conference 2026
✨ Griot & Grey Owl Black Southern Writers Conference 2026
We Were Never Meant to Survive: Rest, Resilience and Radical Joy
📍 Durham, North Carolina | November 13–15, 2026
The Griot & Grey Owl Black Southern Writers Conference was created from a deep and urgent need: to build a space where Black Southern writers can gather, create, connect, rest, and be fully seen.
Too often, Black Southern stories are treated as peripheral to American literature, even as they shape so much of our cultural memory, language, music, history, resistance, and imagination. Griot & Grey Owl exists to put those stories and the people who tell them at the center.
This year’s theme, “We Were Never Meant to Survive: Rest, Resilience and Radical Joy,” asks what it means for Black writers and artists not simply to endure, but to create lives and communities rooted in joy, care, liberation, and possibility.
Over three days in Durham, writers, readers, artists, educators, publishers, and cultural workers will come together for workshops, readings, conversations, performances, publishing opportunities, wellness programming, a literary marketplace, and community-centered experiences.
Our 2026 conference will feature keynote speaker Danez Smith, alongside writers and cultural voices including Tyree Daye, Ericka Hart, Tara Pringle Jefferson, Kwame Mbalia, Dasan Ahanu, Halle Hill, Samara B. Davis, Tamela Julia Gordon, and more.
Durham remains an essential home for this work. From the legacy of Pauli Murray and Black Wall Street to Hayti and generations of Black artists, entrepreneurs, organizers, and storytellers, this city reminds us that Black Southern creativity has always been about more than survival.
🌱 Why We Need You
Griot & Grey Owl is growing.
Our 2025 conference welcomed hundreds of attendees, dozens of writers and speakers, vendors, volunteers, and community partners from across the region. In 2026, we are building on that momentum while continuing to make the conference accessible to writers and readers who are often excluded from traditional literary spaces because of cost, geography, or lack of institutional access.
Community support helps us keep registration affordable, compensate artists and speakers, provide scholarships, expand programming, and create a conference experience that values both creative excellence and care.
Your donation can help us:
- 🎤 Pay meaningful honorariums to Black writers, artists, facilitators, and speakers
- 📚 Provide scholarships and sponsored registrations for writers, students, and community members
- 🖤 Bring nationally recognized authors and cultural leaders to Durham
- 🎭 Support readings, performances, workshops, and public-facing literary programming
- 🧘🏾 Expand wellness, rest, and community-care programming
- 🛍️ Grow our Black literary arts marketplace and support independent authors and creative businesses
- 🎓 Create opportunities for students and young writers to engage directly with working authors
- 🌍 Extend programming into libraries, campuses, neighborhoods, and community spaces beyond the conference itself
📖 Why It Matters
Black writers do not lack talent, imagination, or stories. What is too often missing is access, sustained support, meaningful community, and spaces created with us in mind from the beginning.
Griot & Grey Owl is working to build that infrastructure.
This is not simply a writers conference. It is a gathering place for Black Southern literary life: a place where an emerging writer can meet an editor, where an independent author can find new readers, where a student can hear a writer who changes what they imagine for themselves, and where established artists can gather without being asked to separate their creativity from their humanity.
We believe writers deserve spaces where they can learn and build careers, but also laugh, rest, celebrate, make friends, find collaborators, and remember why they began creating in the first place.
We write alone, but we grow together.
🎉 Help Us Build Griot & Grey Owl 2026
Whether you give $25, $100, $500, $1,000, or more, your support helps us build a sustainable home for Black Southern writers and the communities who love their work.
Every gift helps put another writer in the room, pay another artist fairly, create another public program, or make the conference more accessible to someone who might otherwise be unable to attend.
✨ Support Griot & Grey Owl:
donorbox.org/griot-and-grey-owl
Help us create a weekend rooted in rest, resilience, radical joy, and the radical possibility of Black Southern stories.