For much of her childhood, Yolanda Wisher Palacio ’98 felt as if she were living in two different worlds.
- The McDonogh Report celebrates the contributions of African Americans to the Lafayette community.
Her fondest memories, of spending time at her great-grandmother’s home in Ambler, Pa., where the sounds, images, and closeness of the neighborhood imprinted in her mind a sense of community and kinship, stand in stark contrast to her memories of home, where seclusion was the norm.
“Growing up in a suburban household in North Wales with my mom and two sisters, I was pretty isolated,” says Palacio, who still writes as Yolanda Wisher. “My stepfather had alcoholism and drug problems, and there was domestic violence in the house, so I felt really invisible, silenced, and estranged.”
Unable to verbalize her childhood pain, she began writing poetry “as a way to deal with the crazy things going on at home and also as a way to share my thoughts,” explains Palacio, who teaches 10th-grade English at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia and is organizing the inaugural Germantown Poetry Festival, to be held in April.
Through her poems, Palacio was able to sort through her emotions, and more important, find her voice.
When she got to Lafayette, that voice grew stronger when members of the English department encouraged her to exercise her literary and intellectual abilities. With their encouragement, Palacio began helping freshman students as a Writing Associate; wrote for the College’s literary magazine, The Marquis; became editor of the black literary journal AYA; and served an internship at The Express-Times newspaper. She also received support from Rexford A. Ahene, professor of economics and business and co-chair of the Africana Studies program, to create an individualized, interdisciplinary major in black studies to go with a major in English.
“From the time I went to Lafayette, I knew I wanted to do some important work,” says Palacio, who will be keynote speaker at the College’s annual Honors Convocation April 29. “A lot of the encouragement I got there was that I could do something bigger, that I could influence people.”
As a senior, she won the College’s MacKnight Black Poetry Prize, then went on to Temple University, where she earned a master of arts degree in creative writing and poetry. At Temple, studying under the celebrated black poet Sonia Sanchez and collaborating with literary colleagues, she began fully understand that her voice and poetry could bridge the worlds in which she was raised by connecting people from all walks of life.
“We were a group of activists, teachers, students, community residents that met and started to think about things we wanted to do,” Palacio says. “We started to think about things less in the academic realm and more in the social realm. We started calling it Poetry for the People.”
Palacio explains that Poetry for the People is the name of a book and class taught by the poet June Jordan at the University of California, Berkeley, encouraging students of color to use poetry as activism.
The community-bridging activist activities of Poetry of the People in Philadelphia included organizing free poetry readings and writing workshops and engaging in “guerilla” tactics, which Palacio describes as poetry actions that can happen anywhere, anytime.
One particular action – a 7 a.m. poetry reading on the Market-Frankford elevated subway line – stands out in Palacio’s mind.
“It was really exciting, I remember walking to the train thinking no one would show up, but everyone did,” she says. “We were all really nervous, but we got on the train and spread out through the cars and at spontaneous moments started reading. No one was negative, and people were really intrigued. An old woman said to me, ‘It’s really nice to have a verse in the morning.’ And I remember getting off the train just so pumped up – it was just something that really inspired us. We were young and thought the work we were doing was for social change and for the artist’s perspective.
“Now when I think back on it, it was kind of brave. My students are still impressed by it.”
In 1999 Wisher was named the first poet laureate of Montgomery County.
Poetry for the People eventually faded for lack of a cohesive membership, but Palacio’s ability to influence people with her poetry took on a new direction with a position at Germantown Friends, where she teaches English and urban studies and has become the unofficial poet-in-residence.
“The work I do with kids and poetry really inspires me,” she says. “When I think about young people and the problems they face today – we’ve lost some kids to suicide and violence – I feel it’s really important to give them a voice. I feel like there are a lot of voiceless people out there who don’t have a forum to express themselves.”
The inaugural Germantown Poetry Festival will include a poetry slam where students from her school and Germantown High School – groups who usually harbor animosity toward each other – will compete in a safe, positive environment.
Ultimately, Palacio hopes to link the ideology of Poetry for the People with poetry pedagogy by creating a non-profit organization that teaches the form to people of all ages.
“I’ve seen a lot of different kinds of poetry in my time – in the academic realm, spoken word, performance poetry, slam poetry – and I want to use all of that, because I feel like they are all useful tools for change. I feel like poetry, more than anything else, gets to the root of what it means to be human, to articulate beauty and transformation.”