Join award-winning author and poet Terry Watson and State College's inaugural Poet Laureate, Carmin Wong, for a unique community-centered exploration of poetry, storytelling, disability, race, and justice.

Through reading, discussion, reflection, and creative writing, participants will engage with poetry from the disability and racial justice diasporas while examining the ways identity, lived experience, and intersectionality shape our stories. Together, we will explore how poetry can be a tool for healing, resistance, community building, and social change.

On September 9:

Finding Our Voice

Reflect on selected poems and the stories they tell
Explore how poetry helps us process and understand the world
Discuss techniques for transforming experience into creative work
Begin the process of developing personal narratives through poetry

Registration required.

About the Facilitators:
Terry Watson serves as the Director of Penn State's Office of Accessibility and Inclusion within the Chaiken Center for Student Success and is the founder of Strategies for Justice. Watson is the author of the multi-award-winning book Welcome to the Sick Mind of a Sane Person: Deconstructing Racism and White Supremacy, which explores racism and its impact on the mind through stories, essays, and poetry.

Throughout the workshop series, Watson will guide participants through poetry from the disability diaspora, explore themes of intersectionality, and share excerpts from his forthcoming work, Welcome to the Sick Mind of a Sane Person: Addressing Ableism Within an Ableist Society.

Carmin Wong, State College's inaugural Poet Laureate, brings her commitment to community poetry, cultural engagement, and creative expression to this collaborative workshop experience. Carmin Wong is a Guyanese-born poet·organizer, playwright, and dual-title ph.d candidate in English Literature and African American and Diaspora Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She was appointed the 2025 inaugural Poet Laureate of State College, Pennsylvania. Rooted in Black feminist praxis and a Caribbean diasporic sensibility, her work explores the intersections of oral and written poetries, with particular attention to Black liberation movements across the long twentieth century. Her work has been supported by the Africana Research Center and Center for Black Digital Research at Penn state, where she led the #FrancesEWHarper200 Poetry Project.