CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

November 13–15, 2026
"We Were Never Meant to Survive"
Rest • Resilience • Radical Joy

Every session is an invitation to rest, to imagine, to write, and to reconnect.

Choose a day below or scroll to explore the full weekend schedule

* Please note that as we are working to bring you the best experience things may change* 

Our conference will take place at the following locations :
Frontier RTP 800 Park Offices Dr, Durham, NC 27713 Get Directions ↗
Boxyard RTP 900 Park Offices Dr, Durham, NC 27713 Get Directions ↗
HUB RTP Experience Center 300 Park Offices Dr, Durham, NC 27713 Get Directions ↗

GGO 2026

Friday

Conference Schedule

Registration 9:30 AM–1:00 PM
Registration & Welcome Lounge
Check in, grab your conference materials, meet fellow attendees, visit sponsors, and explore the opening vendor market.
Free and Open to all
Featuring
Griot & Grey Owl Team
Community 11:00 AM–4:00 PM
Community Reception & Vendor Market
Full session description coming soon.
Free and Open to all
Authors, vendors, community partners, and attendees
Panel 2:00 PM–3:00 PM
Afrofuturism, History, and the Black South
Our panel examines the intersections of history and Afrofuturism in telling uniquely Black, and uniquely Southern, stories about our home region. For all of us, Black Southern identity is intricately tied to thinking about the past, present, and future simultaneously. We look to the past to understand the freedom dreams of our ancestors, while using our skills as storytellers to craft new, and ambitious, visions of a proudly Black and Southern form of Afrofuturism
Free and Open to all
Panel 3:00 PM–4:15 PM
Owning a Black Art Business: Building, Gathering, and Sustaining Community
This panel explores the realities of building and maintaining Black-centered arts businesses and cultural spaces, the challenges of sustaining this work, and the role that art, collaboration, and community care play in creating lasting impact. Through honest conversation, panelists will reflect on what it takes to build spaces where creativity thrives and communities can grow together.
Free and Open to all
Moderated by
Break 4:30 PM–5:15 PM
Dinner Break
Full session description coming soon.
Reception 7:00 PM–7:30 PM
Keynote Book Signing & Reception
Full session description coming soon.
Free and Open to all
Featuring

GGO 2026

Saturday

Conference Schedule

Registration 8:00 AM–9:00 AM
Registration
Full session description coming soon.
Featuring
Griot & Grey Owl Team

Concurrent Sessions

Workshop Block One

9:00 AM–10:00 AM

Choose the session that speaks to you.

Craft & Place
Workshop
Writing the South Without Apology: Ecology, Memory, and Southern Landscape
Full session description coming soon.
Featuring
Journalism & Professional Development
Workshop
Digging for the Truth: Reporting, Research, and Finding the Story — A Freelancing Masterclass
Full session description coming soon.
Children & Family
Workshop
Smile Black Child: Interactive Children’s Book Workshop
Smile, Black Child! The Stories We Were Told, the Stories We Needed, and the Stories We Choose to Tell 60-Minute Interactive Writing & Reflection Workshop Before we became writers, we were children absorbing stories about who we were, where we came from, and what was possible for our lives. Smile, Black Child! invites participants to explore how childhood experiences, cultural memory, and the stories we inherited shape our identities and creative voices. Led by licensed therapist and children's author Dr. Thomishia Booker, this interactive workshop combines inner child reflection, guided discussion, and creative writing to explore the stories we were told, the stories we needed, and the stories we choose to tell. Rooted in the conference theme of Rest, Resilience, and Radical Joy, participants will honor their lived experiences, reconnect with their younger selves, and create a new piece of writing that reflects their truth.

Concurrent Sessions

Workshop Block Two

10:15 AM–11:15 AM

Choose the session that speaks to you.

Craft & Joy
Workshop
Writing Joy When the World Is Burning
The world is burning. Injustice, violence, political uncertainty, and collective grief demand our attention. And, as a result, too many of us are left feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. In moments like these, writing about joy can feel frivolous. Perhaps even irresponsible. But what if joy is precisely what we need right now? What if documenting our delight, tenderness, laughter, and love is one way we begin to heal? Inspired by Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts’s award-winning books, Black Joy: Stories of Resistance, Resilience, and Restoration and The Black Joy Playbook, Writing Joy When the World Is Burning is a generative writing workshop exploring joy as a practice of personal and collective healing. While recognizing the power of joy as resistance, this workshop invites participants to move beyond the expectation that our stories must always center struggle. Through guided reflection, embodied awareness, memory work, and creative writing exercises, we will explore how joy lives alongside grief. How documenting our joy can absolutely create an archive of our humanity. Participants will practice techniques for capturing joy through sensory detail and storytelling and develop approaches to writing honestly about difficult times without surrendering the fullness of their lived experiences. They will leave with practices for sustaining a joy-centered writing life.
History & Tradition
Workshop
Hoodoo, Voodoo, and the Stories We Inherit
In this creative workshop, we will explore how the traditions and practices of conjure, hoodoo, voodoo, and other Black healing arts have been—and can be—used by Black writers as living technologies for storytelling and survivance. Though these traditions have been historically misunderstood and maligned, we will take another approach in our work together that intentionally valorizes spiritwork as an ethical mode of being-in-the-world. Through discussion, lecture, and a generative project, we will think about how the historical and ancestral groundings of rootwork have long served Black folk across the diaspora as tools for resistance, as embodied and enfleshed metaphors for fugitvity and escape, as forms of ancestral memory, and as methods for narrating our complex relationships to the natural and spirt worlds. Attendees will engage the rich history of conjure in Black literature, film, and culture from Zora Neale Hurston to Tananarive Due; examine how to use family archives, memories, and the work of critical fabulation to explore Black history and memory in our writing; and create a zine that gestures toward their own investments in the practice of Black magic.
Memory & Preservation
Workshop
Beyond Preservation: Helping Memories Find Their Way Home and Returning Black Stories to the South
What happens to our stories after they're collected, recorded, and archived? Who gets to tell them, who gets to keep them, and how do we ensure they find their way back to the communities from which they came? Drawing on her work with the South Island Gullah Geechee Project, writer and cultural storykeeper Cynthia Harbor explores the responsibilities that come with documenting Black Southern histories. This interactive workshop examines community ownership, ethical storykeeping, and the importance of making oral histories accessible to the families and communities whose lives they represent. Attendees will be invited to consider how we move beyond simply preserving stories toward honoring the people, places, and relationships that give them meaning.
Community 11:00 AM–4:00 PM
Vendor Market & Book Signings
Full session description coming soon.
Participating authors, vendors, and conference attendees
Talk 12:30 PM–1:30 PM
Outside Activation
Land & Lineage: Rooted: Africulture—The Plants and Lands of African People in the South
Boxyard
Community 1:00 PM–2:00 PM
Lunch
Find your new favorite meal at Boxyard
Boxyard

Concurrent Sessions

Concurrent Sessions

1:45 PM–2:45 PM

Choose the session that speaks to you.

Lineage & Craft
Talk
Ancestral Knowledge and Genealogy in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry
Full session description coming soon.
Publishing & Editing
Panel
Editors Roundtable and Pitch Fest
Full session description coming soon.
All Access Only
Editors and agents to be announced

Concurrent Sessions

Concurrent Hallmark Sessions

3:00 PM–4:00 PM

Choose the session that speaks to you.

Sex, Politics & Culture
Talk
“Nasty Work”: Sex, Power, and the Politics of Desire
Sexual health and wellness are intrinsic to any movement toward justice. Put plainly: you simply cannot talk about sex without talking about race and gender, the immense impact our identities---as well as the political and cultural climate under which we live---have on our access to pleasure. This workshop and co-learning experience is a collaborative opportunity for participants to learn the critical intersections between sexuality, race, gender, desirability and identity from a queer, anti-racist lens. It will center those who navigate society from its margins and help participants identify their own complicities in racialized systems of unjust, foster practical ways to make spaces safer for marginalized groups and apply a pleasure and consent based, anti-oppressive approach to their professional and personal lives. Nasty Work What you did not learn in sex ed - if you even had it, will illuminate systems of oppression that directly impact our bodily autonomy, access to pleasure, ability to name our authentic gender and sexuality and dismantle the deep seated belief that able bodies are the only bodies deserving of pleasure. Readers will discover that sex ed is so much more than tips on how to have better sex or give the best cunnilingus. Before the tips and tricks, how our society has already decided who has a body worthy of not only pleasure, but clean water, rest, environmental justice and food sovereignty greatly informs the kind of relationship we have with ourselves and others. What you did not learn in sex ed- if you even had it, is an in depth exploration as to how bodies have been treated historically and how that reality still reflects till this day under the continued political structure of white supremacy. This book disrupts common neoliberal and liberal ideas of justice in that it speaks directly to how structures have been created to effectively keep all of us distracted and deradicalized.
Featuring

Concurrent Sessions

Saturday Afternoon Featured Sessions

4:00 PM–5:15 PM

Choose the session that speaks to you.

5:30 PM–7:30 PM

Choose the session that speaks to you.

Community
Dinner with the Griots
Full session description coming soon.
All Access Only

GGO 2026

Sunday

Conference Schedule

Community 9:30 AM–10:00 AM
Morning Break & Community Gathering
Full session description coming soon.
Community 11:45 AM–12:30 PM
Vendor Market, Book Signings & Community Fellowship w/ Brunch for All!
Full session description coming soon.
Participating authors and vendors
Volunteer 2:45 PM–3:15 PM
Volunteer Closing & Breakdown
Full session description coming soon.
Griot & Grey Owl team and volunteers

All Workshops

All Panels

All Talks

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