Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Poet Laureate Task Force met on October 6, 2026, at 5:34 PM. Members present were Dr. Nick (chair), Pam, Kyle, and Dea, with Imani, India, and Ann also in attendance. The task force adopted funding principles for the program, assigned discovery questions for funding pathways, and scheduled further discussion on the poet laureate selection process for its next meeting.
Note: Ann indicated she could not volunteer for discovery tasks due to pressing matters with the Regional Arts Commission (RAC). The task force will reconvene to continue the selection process discussion and review findings from the discovery groups.
Okay, well, we can go ahead and get started. I'm calling going to call this meeting to order at 5 34 p.m. Hope everyone is doing well. Um Christine, would you mind taking roll for me? Sure thing. Uh Dr. Nick. Here. Pam. Here. Sorry. No worries, Kyle. Here. Dea. Here. You have a quorum. Present, you may proceed. Awesome. Thank you so much. So the first item on the agenda for us to do is the approval of the minutes. These minutes would be well, uh, the August 3rd. We did we did have a session on we had two sessions, one on September 7th, which was with the city council. That was kind of an informal meeting, not an official task force meeting, and then we had a working session on the 14th, at which we did not have quorum. Hi Mani, good to see you. Um, at which we did not have quorum. Um, so there were no uh official task force business or official action taken, but the minutes uh should reflect August 3rd. So I just want to make sure that uh we approve those. And are there any corrections to those minutes? You all had an opportunity to take a look at those from August 3rd. If hearing no connect uh corrections, then um the minutes are approved at distributed. Okay. So the next thing I want to do is kind of go over what was accomplished on September 14th, which was our working session that the lovely Ann hosted at RAC, um, in which myself and Patia and Pam got together and wanted to talk about a number of different things, one being um sort of a path forward or uh understanding what a pathway for funding might look like. And before we started exploring actual pathways, we wanted to first ground ourselves in what the criteria for those pathways would be. What are the things that must be true regardless of what path we look at? We want to make sure that the these five or six things in the criteria are met. And so that was part of our discussion. And then the other part of our discussion was to look at the poet uh laureate selection process and look at what opportunities just kind of go through that process for those who may have not been familiar, and then go through where did we uh what were some misses and wishes? What were some opportunities for us to improve on that process? Um, and what are some of the things that we must improve before we go into this next selection um season going into January? And so we had a great conversation around that. And so what you would have seen in that email is a recap of that session and some notes. So hopefully you've had an opportunity to review those as well as some pictures from the session. They had more detailed sticky notes and things that we discussed as a group. So I'll pause there. Um any reactions, questions, I'll kind of open the floor for discussion. The reactions? Okay, great. So tonight, what we want to do is um, because we weren't able to make any decisions in that room.