SYNERGY - Juneteenth 2022

E. Stanley Richardson

E. Stanley Richardson believes that we are all poets! Yes, everyone. All of us.

He believes that everyday interactions, the casual and the serious, conversations between people are all forms of poetic expression.

In January of 2020, E. Stanley Richardson was selected by the board of Alachua County Commissioners to serve as the county’s inaugural Poet Laureate. “It was a very competitive process, I almost didn’t apply. When the county announced the call for artists, I was just excited that all of my years of advocacy was coming to fruition. That my beloved county was actually going to appoint a poet laureate. I really didn’t think that it would be me!”

As founder and director of ARTSPEAKSgnv Inc., a non profit organization dedicated to promoting literacy, encouraging creativity, expanding ideas and opportunity by providing a medium for expression through the art of Poetry, Spoken-Word, Storytelling and the Creative Arts. The idea for ARTSPEAKSgnv was spawned back in 2012 when he began to seriously consider his own artistic expression.

“I never thought of myself as an artist. Just me saying the word and calling myself an artist felt weird. Writing was just something that I’ve always done, it was how I felt most comfortable communicating with myself and others. Writing was just the device that I’ve always employed to make sense of the world around me”, remembers Richardson.

With the encouragement from his wife Carol Velasques-Richardson, he began to share his poetry with the community and to seek out other poets in the area. It was during this time that he says he discovered how “cliquish” the poetry community was.

“You had all of these different groups of poets meeting all over the place. Black poets meeting over here on this day, LGBTQIA poets meeting over here on this day, Feminists poets meeting over here, Formal poets over here and on and on. So, I just thought about how very cool and extraordinarily powerful it would be to have all of these beautiful voices together under one roof. I approached the city of Gainesville’s Department of Cultural Affairs, we formed a partnership and we held our very first ART- SPEAKS event.”

With the creation of ARTSPEAKS, Richardson wanted to make sure that the organization had a platform for youth to freely express themselves in a safe environment. With that in mind, he established ARTSPEAKS: Courageous Young Voices and has also partnered with Urban-Word and the National Youth Poet Laureate Program, to ensure that teens attending school in Alachua County and other rural north central Florida counties, have equal access to this platform.

Richardson’s dedication to cultivating expression in youth and adults through the power of poetry is unparalleled. He strives to be a community culture bearer – one who embodies culture and transmits it – and his work catalyzes protective factors that strengthen and build resilience in communities such as social cohesion, self-awareness, self-efficacy, and autonomy.