A public art project in Germantown will use poetry to combat gun violence

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Two former Philadelphia poets laureate have launched a poetry and public art program in Germantown designed to curb gun violence.

Healing Verse Germantown creators Yolanda Wisher and Trapeta Mason, along with curator Rob Blackson, will spend five months leading 10 workshops in the neighborhood, encouraging residents to express themselves through poetry.

Selected poems from the workshops will inform 20 new public artworks, expected to be installed in early 2026. The project is coordinated through Creative Philadelphia, formerly City Hall’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy.

Germantown has a population of just over 41,000 and is disproportionately prone to gun violence. Last year 42 people in the neighborhood were shot to death, according to city data. This year is trending downward, seeing 19 gun fatalities so far.

“One of the things we need to talk more about is art and its impact on violence,” said the city’s Chief Public Safety Director, Adam Greer, during the launch event at Joseph E. Coleman Northwest Regional Library in Germantown.

“It’s poetry. People are talking. People are using their words. They’re communicating,” he said. “This is important stuff to our young people.”

Healing Verse Germantown is an extension of the Healing Verse program Mason conceived during her tenure as poet laureate from 2020 – 2021. What began as a phone line where callers could hear a rotation of local poetry anytime evolved into a neighborhood poetry workshop in Kensington.

The Germantown iteration is much more expansive thanks to a $1 million award from Bloomberg Philanthropies of New York City, which every year chooses eight art projects across the country that address public concerns. In 2021, Bloomberg supported a series of large-scale public art installations in Camden, NJ, that addressed illegal dumping.

At the launch event, Mason encouraged the audience to get their poetic juices flowing with writing prompts, such as offering advice to someone you know is facing hardship, or completing a series of phrases: “I want to remember…., “I want to forget…,” “I want to heal my….”

The prompts are printed on cards that are ornately designed and shaped like a bird, a t-shirt, and a boot.

“So creative,” Mason said, admiring the cards. “It’s nice when you have a budget.”

In addition to being a poet, Mason is a licensed social worker. Her work is often about overcoming trauma, which is the impulse behind Healing Verse.

“It’s not just about public art. It’s about public healing,” said Blackson. “Placing these poems in the heart of Germantown where they’re created, people will walk through the streets, and they can see, in their own words, what poetry means to them. What the idea of healing means to them.”

One of Germantown’s neighborhood assets is poetry. The neighborhood has produced four of the city’s seven poets laureate since 2012, the most prominent being the internationally known Sonia Sanchez.

Also from Germantown is the widely known performance poet Ursula Rucker, who helped launch Healing Verse at the Coleman Library with a full-throated and somewhat improvised performance of several pieces.

“It’s so fun yelling in a library,” she admitted. “Thank you so much for this opportunity to yell in my childhood, high school, college library, that I came to stressed out doing all my research papers.”

To spark a community drive to write, Rucker repeated a line by author Zora Neale Hurston.

“If you’re silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it,” she said over and over. “I say it everywhere: ‘If you are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it.’”