Shantigar is proud to welcome Philadelphia Poet Laureate, Yolanda Wisher

“There’s a certain way that our language dis-empowers us every day. It disguises the agents of destruction or violence, and poetry can uncover all of that, can pull back this curtain that can be painful to look at.”

“Poetry is an antidote to alternative facts. It lives in the gray and yet it challenges the gray. It seeks to define the gray. We need those kinds of pockets of language that are more electric, that operate on different vibrations, on different frequencies of comprehension, and that also defy easy understanding, that invite us to hang out in uncertainty, in the mystery of it all.”

“I don’t ever want to be a monotone reading poet putting people to sleep at a poetry reading. I want the poem to come alive every time I read it. I think there’s something in the body and the breath. Walt Whitman knew that, and Alan Ginsberg knew it, and Jayne Cortez knew it. There’s something about the body that’s also important to poetry. The body has its own music and I’m just trying to find mine.”

Excerpts from an interview with Title Magazine
Read the whole article

Listen to a poem by Yolanda

Yolanda’s poetry collection: Monk Eats an Afro
The most stunning debut collection I’ve ever encountered… makes the writer in me envious and the reader in me joyful. — Michael Cirelli

Exquisite poems.— Sonia Sanchez

Wisher’s poems are musical, playful, and brutal, and she infuses spoken language with blues-informed cadence to engage themes of intimacy, power, and identity.

Yolanda Wisher and Josh Adler will be teaching Poetic Justice, a workshop at Shantigar on June June 23 - 25, 2017. This workshop is open to everyone. More info