co-sponsored by: The Creative Writing Program, the Department of Africana Studies, and the Department of English

hosted by: Herman Beavers

rsvp: register here to attend in person

About the Authors:

Therí Alyce Pickens creates powerful, ground-breaking, award-winning scholarship in the fields of Arab American Studies, Black Studies, Comparative Literature, and Disability Studies. She wrote Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke University Press 2019), a theoretical tour-de-force which fundamentally shapes Black Disability Studies. Her editorial work ushered in new conversations about Black Disability Studies in two major journals: African American Review (2017) and College Language Association Journal (2021). Her first monograph, New Body Politics: Narrating Black and Arab Identity in the United States (Routledge 2014) brought together Arab and Black American literary and cultural production through the lenses of Black feminism and Disability Studies. In another editorial project, Arab American Aesthetics (Routledge 2018), she curates a discussion about what makes artistic production uniquely Arab American.

Professor Pickens’s public writing refuses to diminish or pre-masticate the complexities of our world for a wider public. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Black Girl Nerds, The Counter, Inside Higher Ed, and Ms. Magazine. She is a sought-after podcast guest who brings wit, excitement, and humor to podcasts including Busy Being Black, Contemporary Black Canvas, New Books Network, The Cipher, and the MoMA Podcast.

Alongside her scholarship, Professor Pickens is a poet, whose first collection, What Had Happened Was, will debut in 2025 from Duke University Press. She is a proud alum of Margaret Porter Troupe Arts (2006), Community of Writers (2017, 2020), Kenyon Writers’ Retreat (2018), Colgate Writers Workshop (2019), Bread loaf – Sicily (2019), Hurston/Wright (2023), VONA (2023), and Rutgers’ University Poets and Scholars Retreat (2023). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Diode, Black Renaissance Noire, Omnium Gatherum Quarterly, Langston Hughes Review, The Madison Review, and Cane: A New Critical Edition.

In addition to Professor Pickens’s research, she coaches with the National Council for Faculty Development and Diversity. She also runs her own developmental editing and sensitivity reading business: Inquiry Editing, LLC.

A poet, musician, educator, and curator, Yolonda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro. She was named inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, in 1999 and third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia in 2016. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change. In 2022, she was named a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Artist Fellow.

Wisher’s writing has been published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The New York Times, and most recently, the anthologies Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and This Is The Honey: An Anthology Of Contemporary Black Poets. Wisher’s commissioned poetry/spoken word is part of several public artworks and performances including Eight Eight Time (2025) by Kendrah Butler-Waters, Terry Klinefelter, Suzzette Ortiz, and Sumi Tonooka; Ascendance (2024) by Nina Cooke John; The Frances Suite (2022) by Ruth Naomi Floyd, and For Philadelphia (2018) by Jenny Holzer. Wisher performs and records a blend of poetry and song with her band Yolanda Wisher & The Afroeaters.

Wisher 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 an artist-in-residence in Jefferson University’s Humanities & Health program, teaching poetry to first-year medical students, staff, and patients. She is also a lead artist for Healing Verse Germantown, a poetry and public art project that engages Germantown residents in writing poetry in response to gun violence.

Wisher’s curatorial projects include Declaration House (2024), The Re-Emancipation of Social Dance (2024), Love Jawns: A Mixtape (2019), Stellar Masses (2018), Outbound Poetry Festival (2017), Yolanda Wisher’s Rent Party (2017), and City of Poetry (2016). She is the senior curator at Monument Lab, a public art, history, and design studio in Philadelphia.