Jaki Shelton Green and Nikelle Orellana-Reyes, praise song
December 2025
North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green wrote praise song about her grandmother and the women in her family who passed down stories, wisdom, and ways of seeing the world. Now the poem lives at Dix Park, painted across the façade of the Dobbins building near the Gipson Play Plaza.
The full text appears as a single continuous line that wraps the building and loops back to where it began. Designer Nikelle Orellana-Reyes developed the mural, with contributions from designers Joshua Gajownik and Paul Tuorto. Muralist Joseph Giampino painted it by hand.
You can read the poem by walking alongside it. The line pulls you around corners and across walls, and the experience of following it is part of the work: your pace slows, the words accumulate, and a poem about inheritance becomes something you move through rather than just read.
artist statements
Jaki Shelton Green
Most of my poems as a documentary poet are located inside a larger landscape of story inside the context and intersection of identity, geography, memory, and genetic deja-vu (inherited memory). praise song pays homage to my grandmother and generations of women in my maternal lineage who passed on to me an inheritance of stories, wisdom, and a sensibility of all the possibilities for becoming the person I am now.
Nikelle Orellana-Reyes
The design started with the idea of a thread — a line that holds and leads, the way knowledge gets handed down. The poem traces a single path around the building and reconnects with itself, forming a closed loop. That felt right for what the poem is about: wisdom moving from one generation to the next, circling back, picking up again.
I worked with Joshua Gajownik and Paul Tuorto on the design, and Joseph Giampino painted the letters on the building. We wanted the words to pull people along the wall. You follow the text and at some point you stop thinking about reading and start thinking about your own life — who taught you, what they gave you. That was the goal: not just something to look at, but a place to be in for a while.
About Jaki Shelton Green
Jaki Shelton Green is North Carolina's ninth Poet Laureate — the first African American and third woman to hold the position. She is a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, a 2014 inductee into the NC Literary Hall of Fame, and the 2003 recipient of the North Carolina Award for Literature. Green teaches Documentary Poetry at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies and was the 2021 Frank B. Hanes Writer in Residence at UNC Chapel Hill. Her poetry collections include Dead on Arrival, Conjure Blues, singing a tree into dance, breath of the song, Feeding the Light, and i want to undie you. In 2020 she released her first spoken word album, The River Speaks of Thirst. Green also runs SistaWRITE, a series of writing retreats for women held in locations from Ocracoke, North Carolina to Northern Morocco.
About Nikelle Orellana-Reyes
Nikelle Orellana-Reyes is a graphic designer and brand strategist based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Over twenty years her work has spanned naming, brand positioning, logo design, and environmental graphics for clients including J.Crew, Kate Spade, and Eric Ripert, for whom she produced Emmy-winning graphic design. She has held roles at agencies Anomaly NY and Droga5, and previously ran her own floral shop, Wylde Flowers. She is part of the Creative Offices Of, a collaborative design practice.
