Montgomery County Poets Laureate
The Annual Montgomery Poet Laureate Competition is the foundation upon which the MCPL Program was built. The competition is the ultimate expression of the program’s mission; creating an ever expanding community of poets, supporting their work and providing opportunities for poets to elevate their visibility while also benefiting the community with their service project, many of which continue long beyond their tenure.
How does the competition work?
Each year MCPL recruits a celebrity poet with a national reputation, who along with two additional local Delaware Valley poets, adjudicate the submitted manuscripts.
The newly selected Montgomery County Poet Laureate is honored with an award in the amount of $500 along with a personalized statement about their work, which is shared through MCPL and other local organizations.
The Award is presented during an Award Ceremony and Reading, open to the public and attended by the celebrity judge and previous poets laureate to read with and welcome the newest member of their esteemed ranks.
Who can compete?
Poets of all ages and backgrounds are encouraged to submit their poetry for review and adjudication in the annual competition. Poets must also be residents of Montgomery County. The window for submissions generally opens in early December and closes mid-February with the winner to be announced at the end of March.
The role of the Poet Laureate
The Poet Laureate functions as an ambassador for poetry in Montgomery County from April 1 of the year of his/her naming to March 31st of the following year. This role includes working with MCPL’s Executive Director, Joanne Leva, to develop a schedule of readings, workshops
Appearances may include the Forgotten Voices Poetry Group, Farley’s Bookshop First Thursday Poetry Reading Series, and the annual Caesura Poetry Festival. They may also hold the office of “
An interview with Yolanda Wisher
Among 2019 Caesura Festival’s roster of musicians and poets, multi-talented Yolanda Wisher was poet-in-residence. Yolanda was Montgomery County’s first poet laureate (1999) and Philadelphia’s 2016-17 poet laureate. Throughout her career Yolanda has focused on writing, performing, teaching and mentoring young poets. She creates through many modalities: poetry, visual arts, singing and musical collaborations. I’ve been privileged to see her work her magic teaching students in Philadelphia schools. Recently she shared some updates and links to her work.
Current poetry news, honors, projects you want to share?
I have poems forthcoming in the Southern Indiana Review as well as an anthology of Black poetry published by Broadside-Lotus Press. I’m working on the seventh edition of Yolanda Wisher’s Rent Party at the Rosenbach to be held in the spring of 2020. I’m looking forward to teaching poetry to high school students in Colorado for two weeks in February.
Want to talk about any current themes you are exploring?
How strangers can and do become family. How family members become strangers. I’m also writing about the summer I was thirteen, staying with my stepfather’s family in Gray’s Ferry and walking across the University Avenue Bridge to take poetry and biology classes at Penn.
How did MCPL experience affect you as an artist?
I was only 23 years old when I became the first MCPL, so it changed my world and helped me to grow up as a writer. It gave me a deep sense of affirmation and responsibility about being a poet, and it provided me with multiple platforms to develop my expertise as a speaker and performer. Joanne Leva was such a nurturing and supportive leader and guide during that time. She believed in me the way my own mother did.
Goals going forward?
To (ad)venture into different genres. To keep playing with other disciplines like painting and dance and music to see what they do to the way I write poems.
Advice to young poets?
Read promiscuously. Fill up a beautiful journal with random, deep and/or silly thoughts, then get another journal and do it again. Be your own best champion. Imagine yourself 80 and writing.
Speak to the value of how poetry impacts the community, or your poetry in particular?
I think poetry can be a vital part of any community. It is an engine of truth and self-expression. It’s one way we can get to know a person from the inside out. At this moment, locally and nationally known poets are bearing witness to the world’s joys and its injustices. These poems will one day be precious for what they preserve, but they are also a powerful antidote to a despair that would try to swallow us all right now.
Bio, links, poems and artwork
https://www.thetinymag.com/yolanda-wisher: Multiple poems, typewriter poems, and watercolor art.
https://www.utne.com/arts/ballad-of-laura-nelson-poem-ze0z1908zhoe: “The Ballad of Laura Nelson.”
www.philadelphiacontemporary.org/ljam: The website of a new poetry and music podcast she created.
Bio:
Yolanda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro (Hanging Loose Press, 2014) and the co-editor of Peace is a Haiku Song (Philadelphia Mural Arts, 2013). Wisher 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. Wisher taught high school English for a decade, served as Director of Art Education for Philadelphia Mural Arts, and was the 2017-2018 CPCW Fellow in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. Wisher founded and directed the Germantown Poetry and Outbound Poetry Festivals and currently works as the Curator of Spoken Word at Philadelphia Contemporary. She regularly performs a unique blend of poetry and song with her band The Afroeaters and is part of the first cohort of artists with studios at the Cherry Street Pier on the Delaware River Waterfront.
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Poets Laureate
