A three-day festival coming to downtown Fort Lauderdale this week will feature a book fair for local students, music performances and a poetry reading from a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
The Our Voices Festival of Words is the project of Darius Daughtry, a local poet and former public school teacher. In 2015, he started the Art Prevails Project with a goal of creating a platform that would make art accessible for everyone. This is the second year that Daughtry will put on the festival.
"Through celebrating literature and uplifting literacy, the event’s aim is to provide the local community with an annual space to engage with books and writers with a hope to impact, not only quality of life, but directly combat the cycle of illiteracy by creating a content-rich environment for all community members," the festival's website reads.
Daughtry grew up around Sistrunk, a historically Black neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale. He was raised by a single mother and only started writing after an adult gave him a notebook to share his emotions.
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"I am a child of this area... I know the stigmas that are associated, I know the blighted buildings and the surrounding schools and what their test scores are like," he said.
"It was important for me to have this in proximity to that area as much as possible because I think it is a testament of showing and reflecting the beauty that exists in the area and the beauty in the people. I want something that they can have and it feels like it's their own."
The festival is Daughtry's way of giving back to the neighborhood and hopefully helping others to find inspiration through reading and writing like he did.
"I thought that it was something that would be beneficial for the community to have," he said, "for folks to be able to come out and hear from authors and writers and artists, to see them and hear them and perform ... to put books in the hands of the youth."
The festival kicks off Thursday night and runs until Saturday April, 27. Friday night, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Jericho Brown will read poetry and speak with local archivist and writer, Nadege Green.
