Poetry, Ancestors, and Sacred Ground with Jacinta White

Jacinta White defies easy introduction — poet, founder of The Word Project, and a woman who says her answer to "who am I today?" changes with what the day calls for. In this conversation, she traces her path from a childhood split between Charlotte and Detroit, through the sudden loss of her father to a heart attack when she was in her twenties, to finding in poetry a language for grief she couldn't otherwise speak. That loss led her to found The Word Project, using writing as a tool for healing across ages and communities.Her father's death also set in motion the journey behind Resurrecting the Bones. When her uncle suggested they visit the small churches her father had once pastored, what began as a way to feel closer to him grew into visits to Black churches and cemeteries across the South — and a book of poetry born from that pilgrimage. That same instinct, to sit in sacred, often overlooked ground and let the words come, later brought Jacinta to a forgotten cemetery tied to Wake Forest's own history with slavery, where she and Mary stood together among generations of the dead.What runs through the conversation is Jacinta's belief that writing is a portal — a way to sit with grief and history instead of resolving them, to hear what the archives left silent, and to loosen the scripts we've inherited without ever choosing them. It's a conversation about presence over perfection, about possibility not as some distant horizon but as something available right now, in whatever we're brave enough to stay with.