Yolanda Wisher

Yolanda Wisher is a poet, musician, educator, and curator, who is currently working on a performance project, entitled The Re-Emancipation of Social Dance, which honors and advances Black social dance’s liberatory potential, ritualistic dimensions, and transformative magic, restaging the ways Philadelphians created radically free gathering spaces. Approaching Black social dance as a vernacular, poly-vocal, multi-authored art form built over generations, the project signifies on the tradition, responding to the call of its aesthetics while remixing them into a new commission combining dance with theater, music, oral history, and audiovisual media.

The WOO Grant will help cover documentation expenses to hire a photographer who will take portraits in March and April 2024 of each of the performers involved in the project. These portraits will serve as both promotional and archival materials for the show, which is set to premiere during the week of Juneteenth.

Since 2017, Yolanda Wisher has been working with the Rosenbach Museum to uplift Black voices in their archives through Yolanda Wisher's Rent Party, a series which invokes the tradition of the rent party dating back to the Harlem Renaissance. Currently, Yolanda and her band, the Afroeaters, have the opportunity to collaborate with the museum to record an album and create visual content that will pay homage to Black creatives of the past, both known and unknown. In highlighting, preserving, and sharing the indomitable style and attitude of those ancestors, this grant will support Yolanda with finishing funding for the opportunity, particularly around hiring a wardrobe and costume designer for the Jan Van Der Zee-style shoot.

Yolanda was named the inaugural poet laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania in 1999 and the third poet laureate of Philadelphia in 2016. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, she has been a Writer in Residence at Hedgebrook and Aspen Words. The 2017-2018 CPCW Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, Mural Arts of Greater Philadelphia, and founded and directed the Germantown Poetry and Outbound Poetry Festivals. She performs a unique blend of poetry and song with her band The Afroeaters and has led workshops and curated events in partnership with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Free Library of Philadelphia, Business Innovation Factory, and U.S. Department of Arts & Culture. She currently works as the Curator of Spoken Word at Philadelphia Contemporary and is part of the first cohort of artists with studios at the Cherry Street Pier on the Delaware River Waterfront.

Yolanda Wisher has been offered a month-long residency in Woody Creek, Colorado, from October 1-31, by Aspen Words, a program of the Aspen Institute. During the residency, Yolanda will be working on two projects-in-progress — arranging a book of poetry tracing a genealogical quest for ancestors and living relatives, as well as compiling another book of poetics about that work, reflecting on her organizing with Poetry for the People Philly in 1999 and the Germantown Poetry Festival from 2006 to 2010. Yolanda aims for these works to become textbooks and blueprints that will aid her work as a poetry educator and as a teacher of teachers.

Yolanda will guide 12 to 15 young poets from various Philadelphia public and private high schools in the production of a professional quality audio CD of spoken word poetry that students will create during the year and will perform at the Germantown Poetry Festival. Through a collaboration with the Philadelphia Recording Service, the students will record the CD over the course of a week. They will then debut the CD at a release party for family and friends and the Germantown/Mt. Airy community. The sales of the CD will benefit the Germantown Poetry Festival's 2008-09 workshops and annual April event.