Writing Our Communities: Amplifying Community Voices

This event is part of a series called Writing Our Communities. Each event is a group conversation with Prof. Gregory Pardlo and guest speakers. This final event is Amplifying Community Voices: How can writing with a community effect social change? What does it mean to do this work through a social justice lens? View the flyer.

FEATURED SPEAKERS: 

Yolanda Wisher: Poet, singer, educator, and curator Yolanda Wisher is author of Monk Eats an Afro and co-editor of the anthology Peace is a Haiku Song with mentor Sonia Sanchez. Wisher was named inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania in 1999 and third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for 2016 and 2017.

A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change. She taught high school English for a decade, co-founded the youth-led Germantown Poetry Festival, and served as Director of Art Education for Philadelphia Mural Arts. Wisher is the founder of the School of Guerrilla Poetics, a training ground for folks interested in nurturing and mobilizing communities through poetry. 

As Curator of Spoken Word and Co-Director of Curatorial Programs at Philadelphia Contemporary, Wisher has produced programs like Stellar Masses, a series of poetry church services, and Love Jawns: A Mixtape, a collection of spoken word-infused soundscapes. She performs a blend of poetry and song with her band Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters. Doublehanded Suite, their debut album, will be out in 2022. 

Cornelius Eady: Poet/Playwright/Songwriter and Cave Canem Co-Founder Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is Professor of English, and Chair of Excellence at the University of Tenn. Knoxville. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Brutal Imagination, and Hardheaded Weather. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, which was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize for the best first play from an American Playwright in 2001. His awards include Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and was The Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing and Professor in English and Theater at The University of Missouri-Columbia.

Lorene Cary: Having written three novels in college, Lorene Cary began her professional writing career at TIME and TV GUIDE. She then taught at St. Paul’s, the board school she attended as a scholarship student in its early days of coeducation and integration. When her children were very young, she freelanced magazine pieces, including a stint as a contributor to Newsweek, but needed to tell longer stories, through books: first, Black Ice, about being a Black girl at St. Paul’s.

Then Cary began research to see how our history had brought us to now.  That resulted in an UGRR novel, The Price of a Child, which became the inaugural choice of One Book One Philadelphia, during which she also wrote a non-fiction middle-years UGRR book, Free! Great Escapes From Slavery on the Underground Railroad. Pride, a girlfriend novel, followed, and then If Sons, Then Heirs, fiction rooted in the legacy of lynching and the great migration. Ladysitting is her most recent book and has already spawned a short opera Cary wrote with composer Liliya Ugay and a play, commissioned by Arden Theatre, which premiered her first, sold-out play, My General Tubman, in Winter 2020.

Cary has taught writing at UPenn for 25 years, and founded Art Sanctuary, a Black Arts organization which grew successfully for 15 years, and is now under control of the African-American Museum in Philadelphia. The classes she teaches at UPenn now allow her students to write for #VoteThatJawn, which she created, at students’ urging, to bring 18 to 24-year-olds to the polls in Philly.