Poetry in Motion
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Arlington County is offering residents an opportunity to have their poetry spotlighted. From December 15, 2025, to February 15, 2026, the Arlington County Cultural Affairs Division in partnership with Arlington Transit will accept submissions. Moving Words makes poetry a part of daily life for commuters riding Arlington Transit (ART) by replacing advertising placards inside public buses with poems by local poets.
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Submissions must be poems of ten lines or less that will be displayed inside ART buses between March and September 2026. This year's competition will be judged by Arlington Poet Laureate Jennifer Kronovet!
Four poems will be selected to be printed on colorful placards and displayed prominently on area buses, enlivening the ride for thousands of commuters. Each winner will also receive a $250 honorarium. Winning poems will be posted and archived on ArlingtonArts.org.
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Poets who live within the D.C. Metro transit area (the Northern Virginia counties Arlington, Fairfax and Loudoun, and the cities Alexandria, Fairfax and Falls Church; the District of Columbia; and the Maryland counties Montgomery and Prince George's) and are over 18 years old are eligible to enter. There is no fee to enter. Access the form here.
A Conversation with Courtney LeBlanc
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An interview with Courtney LeBlanc will give listeners of Embracing Arlington Arts Talks a chance to learn about her beginnings as a poet. She served as Arlington County’s Poet Laureate for two years starting in 2024. Embracing Arlington Arts had the good fortune of having her as a guest for its recent fundraiser.
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In her role as a poet laureate, she serves as an advocate for poetry and the literary arts and works to advance Arlingtonians’ consciousness and appreciation of poetry in its written and spoken forms. The Poet Laureate represents Arlington’s commitment to fostering a creative environment that encourages collaboration, innovation, and community participation. What follows is an excerpt from the interview which can be heard here in its entirety.
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Carlos Velazquez: Courtney why don't you share with our listeners a little bit about yourself and your beginnings as a poet?
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Courtney LeBlanc: Sure, like many writers, I started really young, when I was a teenager, probably, writing terrible, terrible, angsty, moody, emo poetry, but I… but I think that, that's really important, right? It's important to… to start getting your feelings on paper. So I've always… I've been writing for years and years, and in college I decided to study business, because I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. And so I thought that was very safe. And it was, but in my 30s, I really got back into poetry, and in my late 30s, I went and got my MFA, my master’s in fine arts in poetry, and really started getting very, very serious about it. And so now I'm 46, and I run a publishing company. I've published four collections, full-length collections of poetry, and I just think that poetry really owns my heart now.
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Carlos Velazquez: Oh, that's wonderful. And so, I have to ask the question, when did you discover that you had a love for language?
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Courtney LeBlanc: I think pretty young. My mom was a really big reader. I started reading at a pretty young age, and I grew up in a very, very tiny farming town in North Dakota, but my mom made sure to take my siblings and I to the library, you know, every couple of weeks, and we would check out a dozen books, as many as we could, and… and we would go home and just read. So I think I always loved language.
But initially it came in the form of, you know, fiction and stories, and then when I was a teenager, I kind of fall in love with poetry, even though I don't think I really understood poems and what they were. You know, it was when I got a little bit older and started reading living writers, that I really, really fell in love
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Carlos Velazquez: That's incredible. And so, do you remember the very first poem that you wrote?
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Courtney LeBlanc: I don't know if it was the very first, but I remember a very early one when I was, probably 12 years old. And it's terrible, it was rhyming, which I'm generally not a fan of, and it was about being kissed for the first time. I had not experienced my first kiss so I had no business writing about it. It was… it was awful. But we all… many of us come from humble beginnings, so…
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Carlos Velazquez: That's so funny. And what about your first published poem? Do you remember that?
Courtney LeBlanc: I think so. We had a family friend who died really young, and I saw how it affected both my parents, because she was… she was my parents' age, and of course, when I was 15, I thought they were ancient. They were the age I am now. But that's, you know, that's really young to lose someone, and I saw how my parents were just devastated by this loss, and I… I started writing about it in a very clumsy, clunky way, but one of those poems ended up getting published, which was lovely.
Take a Walk to Discover Arlington's Public Art
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Arlington Public Art is an internationally renowned, award-winning publicly and privately
funded program. Since 1979, when art was first negotiated as part of a private development project, Arlington has been an innovator in the field of public art. That first artwork – Nancy Holt’s acclaimed Dark Star Park – was dedicated in 1984. Now, forty years later, Arlington is home to a diverse and rich collection of over eighty permanent public artworks.
The commissioning of these works has been guided by a Public Art Policy and Public Art Master Plan, which call for an integrated approach to public art in the places where the County invests its resources. It is possible to take a tour of the public art that Arlington has to offer. This self-guided tour map will help you discover such works as:
John Robinson Jr. Town Square Tower designed by Walter Hood who took inspiration for the design of the sculpture from the history and community of Green Valley. Hood was especially influenced by the historical ties between the neighborhood and Freedman’s Village, a community for escaped slaves and free persons established at the end of the Civil War on property which later became home to the Pentagon and Arlington Cemetery. Former Freedman’s Village residents who remained in the area further populated several of Arlington County’s traditionally African American neighborhoods including Arlington View, Hall’s Hill and Green Valley.
Gravity and Grace designed by Cliff Garten is a large-scale LED public artwork integrated into the architecture of Central Place Plaza in Rosslyn. The work is 150-feet long by 15-feet high and occupies the top two bays of the parking structure above the plaza. Inspired by color field painting and open tuning on blues guitar, the ever-changing artwork incorporates real-time environmental data that organizes its spectral shifts of color.
Quill is a 2014 public art installation by Christian Moeller located at N. Fort Myer Drive, 19th Street, and N. Moore Street in Arlington, VA, on the façade of an electrical substation. Inspired by bald eagles on the Potomac, it features nearly 20,000 reflective green discs that shimmer during the day.
Christ in Blessing restored at the Central United Methodist Church by the artist group Louis Comfort Tiffany Studios. This Tiffany-stained glass window was originally part of a grouping of thirteen windows that ornamented the Abbey Mausoleum in Arlington for many years. The mausoleum, built by the United States Mausoleum Company from 1924 to 1926, was an impressive Romanesque-style structure that neighbored Arlington National Cemetery and in 1942 was included within the grounds of Henderson Hall, the U.S. Marine Corps headquarters. With its granite exterior, marble interior, and stained-glass windows, the building was said to have resembled a cathedral and served as a prestigious burial ground for affluent residents of the area.
