Poetry Street’s Chip Williford is Suffolk County’s new poet laureate

Chip Williford, the director and co-host of the Riverhead-based Poetry Street, has been named Suffolk County Poet Laureate.

The appointment of Williford as Suffolk County’s 12th poet laureate earlier this year  by the Suffolk County Legislature made history. He is the first African American ever to hold the post in Suffolk, his immediate predecessor Deborah Hauser told a crowd gathered to celebrate the occasion last month at the Walt Whitman Birthplace Museum in Huntington. 

He was selected by a panel of Suffolk’s past poets laureate, including Hauser. The panel recommended Willford to the County Legislature as 2025-2027 poet laureate, which officially appointed him in March, effective June 1. 

“Anyone who has read Chip’s work or heard him read knows he’s an excellent poet and storyteller in the tradition of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin,” Hauser said at the June 29 event, known as the “passing of the twig” ceremony. “His work is passionate and moving,” she said. “He inspires enthusiasm and creativity in others. During his term, I know he will help others find their voice  and discover the power of telling their own stories.” 

Williford has already been doing that with Poetry Street, Hauser noted. Leadership and community service is one of three criteria for the selection of a poet laureate, along with the quality of the candidate’s poetry and diplomacy and tact, Hauser said. 

He brings “new representation to the face of poetry on the island, and I am so excited to see how he serves the community during his tenure,” she said. 

Williford said the offer to be Suffolk’s next poet laureate took him by complete surprise. It took him some time to say yes.

Williford, 64, returned to school as an adult, studying radio and television production at Suffolk County Community College. He graduated with highest honors. He works as a videographer, filmmaker and documentarian in addition to writing poetry and short stories. 

Poetry, though, is his passion and he’s excited to be sharing that passion with the wider community of Suffolk County. A poet laureate functions as an ambassador for the genre and an educator who helps people understand it and encourages people to write themselves. That comes naturally to Williford and is a core part of his role as director and co-host of Poetry Street.

He has the loving support of family, including his husband, the singer John James. James wrote a verse for Williford that he initially planned to sing, he told the audience at the twig ceremony, but he decided to read the words aloud instead. He called the tribute “Quiet Courage.”  

“The best way to get to know someone is by watching how they treat other people. Quiet courage is not brass or boastful. It’s empathetic, nourishing, uplifting and giving. It doesn’t require attention,” James read. “It sees the unseen and it listens to the unheard. It gives voice to those that have been silenced. It brings movement to where there is no motion. Every space it moves into is transformed for the better. It sees opportunities in the midst of chaos.”

Susan Dingle, who cofounded Poetry Street with Robert “Bubbie” Brown in 2014, addressed Williford in a video recording played during the event. 

“You are the perfect person to be the poet laureate of Suffolk County at this particular moment in history,” Dingle said from her home in Clarke County, Washington, where she was herself named poet laureate last year. “I think you were really chosen because your voice will be really powerful. You will encourage others to find their voices and speak their truths.”

Williford’s poems are expressions of feelings both intensely personal and universal.

“I write from my heart,” he said. “I write about my childhood. I write about people I don’t even know. I think that poetry is a way to communicate when you can’t really say the words or tell the whole truth of what is happening. When you can’t talk about abuse or can’t talk about mistreatment, poetry helps to get those feelings out.” 

Williford read several of his poems during the ceremony at the Whitman Birthplace. 

Watch video of the full ceremony on YouTube.

In “Shame is Not Mine to Own,” written in the voice of a child, he recalls the violence he experienced as a child, as discipline was meted out by his father, with a switch or a belt, to him and his siblings one by one. 

“I have heard him read that poem many times, and it never, never, ever fails to move me deeply,” Hauser said.

In “Idea of America,” Willford connects personal experience with his history as the descendent of enslaved African Americans who suffered family separations, physical abuse and rape at the hands of white slaveholders. 

Through his work researching his own family history, examining records in county clerks’ offices in Virginia and North Carolina, Williford learned details about an enslaved female ancestor who bore the child of a slaveholder named Overbey. Williford was able to locate records of his Black ancestors going back to 1775 and his white ancestors going back to 1500. 

He read “Idea of America” aloud at the event.

My great grandfather’s father, Peter, was born enslaved
With a value of five hundred thirty-eight dollars he was appraised
Listed Negro Boy as chattel property
right there on the Inventory Sheet of slave owner, Allen T. Overby, 1858 recently deceased
Then bequeath to another slave owner
I shame more by not mentioning the name to whom he was released

At the very early age of seven, Peter was separated from his family
peeled violently from the loving arms of his weeping mother Jenny
snatched, shirt soaking wet with the tears of his brothers,
Frank age 4 and two-year-old Joe
Did Peter ever see his family again?
It hurts to say I still don’t know…

We are the proud descendants of those who were treated worse than barren dirt Our fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers were beaten, bought, sold, bred, rented, and traded
No words could ever excuse our hurt
Everything about us they told us was hated.

I will not be quiet or get over it, nor will I forget
That’s right, as long as I can still remember
And as long as I have breath, I will tell our stories…

Please, Please Learn and let’s heal from the scars of history
America, Please don’t lose sight!
Based on the notion
If this “Idea” of “America”
Truly being “The Great Nation” “Land Of The Free”
Then Liberty, Equality and Justice Must be Inclusive
Including people who look like Me.

Dingle told Williford it’s been “fabulous over the years to watch you grow and blossom into the poet that you are, with your prophetic vision and your ability to connect your personal experience with the larger cultural experience of your people…We have a responsibility to represent the voices that are unheard, the voices that are marginalized and invisibilized in our society and you have been doing that in so many ways.”

Dingle and Poetry Street cofounder Brown loom large in Williford’s life as a poet, as does Poetry Street itself. He met them both through community organizer Donna Stovall, who Williford met in 2015 at the Suffolk Theater while he was working there as a visual artist and technical director. Stovall asked for his assistance with a Black history celebration and he met DIngle and Brown there. They invited him to Poetry Street — and the rest is history.

When Dingle was preparing to relocate in 2020, Brown asked Williford if he would consider becoming Poetry Street’s director. At that point, Poetry Street had become a completely virtual event because of the pandemic. Williford set up a Zoom interface and Poetry Street’s own YouTube channel. He and Maggie Bloomfield became cohosts, with Claire Lundberg running the Zoom during meetings. Today Poetry Street — dubbed “the room without a roof, where every voice is heard” — is a hybrid monthly event, meeting in person at Riverhead Free Library and by Zoom, allowing people to watch and participate from anywhere in the world. That sometimes includes Dingle, who joins in from Washington State.

Poetry Street was born as part of the “JumpstART” program created by East End Arts in 2014 with a grant from JumpstART Program (Arts): This program, created by East End Arts in 2014, to provide professional development for artists and try to integrate them into the local business community. Featuring public art installations and performances in downtown Riverhead, JumpstART provided workshops on business skills for artists, including fundraising, marketing, proposal writing, legal matters.  

Williford, Brown and Dingle were not the only JumpstART alumni at the “passing of the twig” ceremony: Caitlyn Shea, executive director of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, was a visual artist who created one of several public art installations funded by JumpstART: a painted mural depicting oversized hummingbirds and flowers, on the side of a building overlooking a vacant lot just on the corner of McDermott Avenue and East Main Street.

Shea recalled being invited by Susan to a poetry reading. She was hesitant, she said, thinking “I don’t know anything about poetry” and wondering if she’d feel awkward and out of place there. Quite the opposite, she learned. “Ever since then, I have loved poetry,” she said.

The people in the room at the Walt Whitman Birthplace for the celebration of Williford’s appointment as poet laureate bore witness to the depth and breadth of the impacts of poetic verse on people from all walks of life, at all stages of life.

Sometimes, as in Williford’s life, its impacts are felt at a very young age. As a child of about 8, he was coping with bullying by other children because of a stutter. He was inspired by the reading of Langston Hughes’ poem, “Mother to Son” by Martin Luther King Jr., which he heard on the radio while in the car with his own mother. She realized that “it clicked with me,” he said, and suggested that he channel his own frustration writing. His mother told him Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and James Baldwin were her favorite writers.

“And I’ve been writing ever since,” Williford said.