School of Guerrilla Poetics

Yolanda Wisher is a public poet. At 23, she became the first poet laureate of the Pennsylvania county where she grew up. She served as the third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia in 2016-2017. The author of Monk Eats an Afro, Wisher performs a unique blend of poetry and song with her band The Afroeaters. Wisher leads poetry workshops for preschoolers to elders, creating radical classroom spaces and communities in schools, halfway houses, and prisons. Active in Philadelphia's artistic and cultural sphere for over two decades, Wisher has led numerous community-driven programs rooted in the practice of poetry as a public art, including a neighborhood poetry festival, literary takeovers of local museums, a series of poetry sermons, and a poetic address to the nation. Wisher currently works as the Curator of Spoken Word at Philadelphia Contemporary where she produces the podcast Love Jawns: A Mixtape.

Many social service institutions and organizations in cities are discriminatory and culturally insensitive. Working class, low-income, and poor BIPOC pay a steep price for this ineffectiveness in terms of their access to and quality of services. 

Poets and poetry practitioners, particularly those who come from BIPOC communities, can serve as bridges between local folk and social service institutions and organizations, making their work more effective and sustainable. 

I want to teach poets and poetry practitioners how to enter schools, hospitals, nursing homes, community centers, shelters, and prisons and become local "heroes": people who hold all forms of humanity sacred and help others work toward shared goals. I want to arm poets with trauma-informed and mindfulness techniques that could help to deescalate tense situations, limit the involvement of law enforcement, and address some of the root problems of social issues though opportunities for self-expression, confidence building, and a sense of belonging. 

Many poets are shown only a few paths to poethood: Be an English major, go to grad school, and then hope to become a professor and teach so that you'll be able to write books during the summer. Or become a poetry slam champ and build a marketable brand and hustle to get gigs. Local poets without access to college education, awards, networks, or competitions are often neglected or rendered invisible in the mainstream literary industry. There are many poets laureate posts in the U.S. at the county, city, state and federal level. In 2017, poetry reading surged up a remarkable 76 percent, to 28 million people. The number of 18-to-24-year-olds who read poetry more than doubled between 2012-2017. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg of how many unacknowledged or unactivated poets are writing and performing in local spaces around the U.S. What if these poets, many of whom are already engaged in the work of social change in their communities, could be offered new educational credentials beyond the "ivory tower" or the publishing industry? School of Guerrilla Poetics creates a new path for poets and activates them as local, national, and global agents of social change. 

The School of Guerrilla Poetics is an alternate degree/certificate program for poets and poets practitioners. Through a series of educational experiences like courses, collaborative projects, and internships, students will become trained to work as a poet in a school, hospital, center, prison, etc. 

Coursework will explore topics such as mindfulness, trauma-informed practices, prison education, anti-racism, and decolonization.

The School of Guerrilla Poetics courses are taught by a faculty of poet activists and cultural workers who have already been flexing poetry as a public art. 

The School of Guerrilla Poetics certification/degree could be offered online or in collaboration with community colleges. It could be used as a stand-alone credential or could be a foundational certification for someone exploring an undergraduate or graduate English, law, social service, education, or health degree. Or it could be a certification for someone already trained in one of these fields who wants to expand their skillset or change career directions. 

The community whose lives my project affects directly are folks who are often marginalized from equitable and exciting educational opportunities because of race, class, and income. They are part of neighborhoods and communities that lack access to resources and political power. I'm talking about BIPOC folks in halfway houses, shelters, prisons, underfunded public schools. They are children, they are adults, they are elders. As a public poet and educator, I've focused my pedagogy on these folks because I have family like them. They are members of my neighborhood, they are residents of my city. I want the School of Guerrilla Poetics to serve these folks AND I want this program to inspire and train them to become leaders in their own right. Through School of Guerrilla Poetics, we will create a "League of Public Poets" made up of people who know what it feels like to be marginalized, to be ignored, to be disenfranchised and who passionately desire to change that experience for someone else coming after them.

Kids in Philly public schools, BIPOC folks in prisons and substance abuse programs often get left behind. And worse yet, when "help" arrives, they often get condescended to instead of truly uplifted and empowered. The School of Guerrilla Poetics meets folks where they are with empathy and respect and helps them to find ways to use their voice to speak and write the change they want to see around them. It offers poetry as a tool for personal growth and community problem-solving. What if poetry became a way out?

When I was in grad school I started a guerrilla poetry collective based on June Jordan's Poetry for the People blueprint, in which she used the work of BIPOC poets to radically engage her students at UC Berkley and the surrounding community. Our collective read poems on the subway during rush hour, taught workshops in libraries and unmarked domestic abuse shelters, and poetry caroled outside of laundromats. It was a grand experiment that became my antidote to the exploitative poetry slam culture of the early 2000s and the oppressive teaching of poetry in graduate school. I started to build a teaching practice around poetry as a public art when I started teaching highschool English in Philly. Eventually after teaching hundreds of workshops as a freelance poet and educator, I started developing a framework that could be shared with other folks who wanted to teach poetry in a similar way. I created a weekend intensive course called School of Guerrilla Poetics in September 2019 to test out the foundational course model and have since trained about 15 poets in the first cohort. This fall, I will teach a graduate level version of the course for Temple University's MFA program.  

As I've become more accomplished in the field of poetry, carving out a path that's resisted making meaning or value of my work through the academic sphere or mainstream awards, it's important to me to share this life of poetry with a younger group of poets, especially those who are seeking ways to really impact their community beyond entertainment and intellectual study. This project is my legacy as a  public poet. It's a way to show folks that you can make a life of poetry in a different way that centers community activism. This isn't a new idea. It's a tradition of art activism that I was steeped in through my reading of Black Arts Movement and Harlem Renaissance era writers. I'm passionate about keeping this tradition alive and finding ways to sustain it and remix it for the 21st century. 

I hold a BA in English and Black studies and an MA in Creative Writing/Poetry. I have been an educator for more than two decades teaching K-12, college, and graduate classes. I've taught thousands of students in hundreds of workshops for all ages. I continue to mentor young writers and educators. I am a two-time poet laureate. I have created numerous poetry programs with budgets ranging from 10k to 500k. I am skilled at building creative partnerships with institutions. I have been an arts administrator for over ten years, at one point managing an art education budget 2.5 million dollars. I am Black woman who grew up in a working class family. When my mother realized I had a talent for poetry at age 8, she scraped together money to send me to poetry workshops and to cover contest fees. She fought for me to be placed in gifted education programs so that my literary gifts could thrive. I know intimately how important education is to building wealth and power. I deeply understand the power of poetry to change lives. 

I grew up with an abusive stepfather. He struggled with anger issues and drug addiction. On one occasion when I was 13 and my stepfather was insulting my little sisters' weight, I stood up to him and verbally told him to stop. He punched me in the face. My mother took me and my sisters into another room and wiped away the blood and tears, trying to wipe away the situation as she had done times before. My tears were angry, and my mother must have feared what I might do in trying to resist my father's violence. So she sent me away to a summer poetry program for a month in the city. Poetry was literally my way out of an abusive household. Today, I carry my stepfather's surname as my writing name. The experiences I endured with him were some of the most challenging of my life. But they made me into a poet and they allow me to connect authentically with people who've had similar struggles. Growing up with domestic violence has made me closely examine how to create the tenderness that is possible through human relationships, especially through artistic expression.

I was teaching English at a private school in my neighborhood of Germantown at a time when the local public school was suffering a lot of negative national press due to violence among youth after school hours. I started to hear folks referring to kids in Germantown, many my neighbors, as criminals and animals. Listening to my private school students, I realized that they didn't really know these kids from the public school down the street. I remember thinking about how I could help Germantown in that moment and saying to myself, All I've got is poetry. And I found a way for it to be enough. I decided to create a poetry workshop for kids from both schools so that they could meet and write together after school. The workshops blossomed into a four-year neighborhood poetry festival and youth development program that featured youth poets as headlining artists and adult poets as opening acts. What started out as two schools, because of network of students from schools across the city who would come to Saturday workshops for pizza and poetry. The festival eventually led me away from private school teaching and into running a citywide afterschool arts education program. 

Philadelphia Contemporary is the larger organization. I am employed as the Curator of Spoken Word there. This project would be a program that I would produce as part of my work at Philadelphia Contemporary. 

This project reframes poetry as a tool and mindset for social good, not just intellectual or artistic pursuit. It suggests that within the reading and writing and teaching of poetry lies a new way towards empathy, collaboration, and collective voice. This project puts poets in the position of leaders, activists, change makers. It trains poets to become creators of social values. 

School of Guerrilla Poetics trains marginalized people to be public poets. 

We work with social service organizations and institutions to integrate poetry into their offerings and methodologies.

These institutions/organizations work with public poets to augment and expand social services. 

Public poets empower other marginalized folks seeking these services towards self-expression and advocacy. 

Marginalized folks become empowered to use their voices to make changes in their own lives and communities. 

Social service institutions understand the effectiveness of the arts in building better access and quality of services to marginalized populations. 

School of Guerrilla Poetics is in development. In September 2019, I taught the first School of Guerrilla Poetics weekend intensive for 12 students in collaboration with Philadelphia literary organization Blue Stoop. I will be teaching a graduate school version of the course for approximately 6 students this fall. In 2020, I plan to develop a second weekend intensive course for 30-40 students (including members of the first cohort) in Philadelphia focused on mental health training for poets based on the intro level certification that social workers receive. In 5 years with funding, I plan to have trained a League of 100 Public Poets in Philadelphia.

I plan to build this program's courses and faculty on a virtual home in the next two years. Within five years, I plan to initiate partnerships with community colleges across the country to house the program. 

I need time and support and funding to develop this program to its fullest potential. There is much I need to learn about certificate and alternate degree programs and how they are developed and sustained. I need to raise money to pay faculty to teach the courses that I envision as part of the program. I also need to develop partnerships with social service institutions and organizations. 

I worked with Philadelphia literary organization Blue Stoop to develop the first weekend intensive course of the program. 

The prize would provide the time and professional support integrated into my current position at Philadelphia Contemporary to develop this program to its fullest potential, with the full support of my organization. The network of professionals that The Elevate Prize could leverage for me could help me to learn about program models up close and get connected with funding opportunities and partner organizations. 

I want to partner with social service organizations and community colleges.