Orlando has a new poet laureate. Camara Gaither officially received the title earlier this week at a City Council meeting.
She is Orlando’s third poet laureate and will serve a four-year term presenting original poems at city events, overseeing Orlando’s annual poetry contest, and acting as a cultural representative for the City Beautiful..
Gaither is an author, an award-winning spoken word artist, and also a practicing mental health professional. She said she sees an overlap between poetry and mental health, and that informs both her service to the city of Orlando and her practice.
In fact, Gaither trained with a governing body in her field, the International Federation of Biblio/Poetry Therapy, and used her work to help people recovering from trauma, like veterans, at-risk youth, and survivors of human trafficking.
“These different groups would be writing poetry, and feeling like they have a say in their story, in the shaping of their story, and they have a way to process their story,” explained Gaither. “They also have a way to feel pride in what they have to say.”
Gaither sees herself as a storyteller, and with that comes the responsibility to amplify the life experiences of people within the Orlando community that aren’t often heard, she said, and to foster understanding. And that is part of the reason she describes becoming Orlando’s poet laureate as both exciting and terrifying.
“You really have to reflect deeply about what you can contribute and what you can't contribute, and what your place will be in the mix of things,” she said of the application process. “So to feel like what I uniquely bring, not only as a therapist, but as a storyteller, as a poet, as a mom, as a wife, as a friend, all these different parts of me - that that's valued and has a place in the city of Orlando, and that it has a place in the Mayor's vision for the city, it felt really affirming to me. This is such an incredible honor to just show up as I am, and to want to serve my city, and to want to make sure there's more touch points for poetry with different communities and populations.”
Gaither said poetry has a unique relevance to the current cultural moment.
“There's a way that poetry has a magic of telling the truth and articulating what deserves our attention with urgency, in a very nuanced way,” she explained. “So I feel like in the midst of different communities, different issues, different things going on in the country and the world…there's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of pain, there's a lot of chaos, there's a lot of confusion, but there's a lot of hunger to be able to see things that actually are beautiful and good that are going on alongside everything that's challenging.”
“I feel like poetry has a way of giving us a place to put pain, and a way of giving us a way to savor beauty, and telling the truth about both things at the same exact time,” Gather said.
