Fred Joiner is a poet and curator living in Chapel Hill, NC. Fred has read his work nationally and internationally, his work has been translated into German, Chinese, and French. Joiner is a two-time winner of the Larry Neal Award for Poetry and a 2014 Artist Fellowship Winner awarded by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. In 2015, Joiner’s ekphrastic poem “Below as Above” won the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art’s Divine Comedy Poetry Contest, in response to Abdoulaye Konate’s tapestry work. As a curator of literary and visual arts, Joiner has worked with the American Poetry Museum, Belfast Exposed Gallery (Northern Ireland), Hillyer Artspace, Honfleur Gallery, Medina Galerie (Bamako, Mali), the Phillips Collection, the Prince Georges County African American Museum and Cultural Center, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art, and others. He is a board member of The American Poetry Museum and Arch Development Corporation, and the co-founder of The Center for Poetic Thought.