Jaki Shelton Green is following her grandmother’s instructions.

“My grandmother told me, ‘This is what you will do: you will tell. Your job is to tell,’” Green says to a dozen sixth graders at Rochelle Middle School.

It is a job she does as an author with eight books of poetry to her credit, as a teacher at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, as Poet Laureate of North Carolina since 2018 and, this week, as writer-in-residence at Rochelle.