Germantown resident Steven Taylor has always had respect for the craft of poetry. But even after co-hosting open mic nights at his art gallery with friends in the poetry scene, he hadn’t really considered writing it himself until stumbling upon a workshop in his neighborhood.

The workshop started simple. Taylor participated in individual and group exercises designed to foster confidence and encourage vulnerability. But something complex arose from that. Taylor, who runs the Ubuntu Fine Art gallery in Germantown, says he was able to put thoughts and feelings about gun violence into words that he had been “repressing for a good long time.”

“A few years back, there was a shooting outside of my house, and a bullet came through my window. Had I not ducked, it would have probably hit my head. But I’d never really talk about it. It’s par for [the] course living in this neighborhood,” Taylor says. “I know it’s in the back of my mind, but how is it impacting me in ways that I’m not quite sure? This workshop allowed me to sit and write about that in a way that I hadn’t yet.”

The workshop was part of Healing Verse Germantown: The Streets are Talking, a new initiative funded by a $1 million Bloomberg Philanthropies grant. The project aims to help the Germantown community process the mental health impacts of gun violence and share stories of healing through creative expression, developing their poems into public art installations. It’s the brainchild of Trapeta B. Mayson and Yolanda Wisher, artists who have both served as Philadelphia Poets Laureate and who’ve been friends for 25 years.

As Germantown residents, they also understood why the neighborhood was a perfect site for this project. “There’s a really vibrant artist community [in Germantown] and folks who know that art can save lives, art can change the tone of somebody’s day, art can really hold institutions accountable but also build them,” says Wisher.

A continuing legacy

There are three overlapping components to the project: first the poetry workshops; then adding material from the workshops to a publicly-accessible poetry “hotline;” and then finally transforming the poetry into public art installations. The initiative is a continuation of work that Mayson took on when she served as Philadelphia Poet Laureate from 2020 to 2021.

Around that time, Mayson recalls that she had been buzzing with ideas about addressing mental health through poetry. Like she often does, Mayson shared them with Wisher over lunch. Then, of course, the Covid pandemic hit, and exacerbated mental health impacts in Philadelphia and around the world.

Eventually, Mayson launched the Healing Verse Philly Phone Hotline in January 2021. Callers could dial 1-855-POEMRX2 and press a button to hear a new poem written by a Philadelphian, or be connected with mental health resources.

“I had already thought about doing the phone line, but it became even more urgent,” Mayson says. “I wanted to find a way to still reach people. The Covid pandemic was such a time of, You can’t really touch, you can’t be in touch, you can’t see people. But having the ability to pick up the phone and to share a call … people were still able to interact with poetry in their daily lives.”

After Mayson’s term as Laureate ended, Wisher was able to find a new home for the phone line at Philadelphia Contemporary, where she was working as a curator. In the meantime, Mayson and Wisher, along with Wisher’s colleague Rob Blackson, brainstormed ways to expand the project even further in collaboration with the City’s arts access department Creative Philadelphia, developing a plan for the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge Grant.

“We got our wish to focus on Germantown, which was a neighborhood that Trapeta and I both live in and we love in and we spent a lot of time as artists working in. And it has also been one of the hardest hit areas by gun violence,” Wisher says.

Germantown’s population of over 41,000 is disproportionately affected by gun violence. Between 2020 and 2023, over 400 people in PPD District 14, which contains the neighborhood, were shooting victims. Over that time period, about 8,500 Philadelphia residents in total were victims of gun violence. While the neighborhood is home to less than 3 percent of the city’s population, it accounts for roughly double that number when it comes to shootings.

The first phase of the million dollar project involves Wisher and Mayson hosting 10 poetry workshops from October 2024 through February 2025, with different groups of Germantown residents. Some are open to the public, while several private workshops are aimed at populations especially impacted by gun violence.

While participants in the workshops aren’t required to share their poems with the group or the public, they are encouraged to submit their poems and read them aloud for the phone line. By the end of each workshop, Wisher says, it’s been nice to see that “almost everyone” wants to share.

She’s also been touched by the intergenerational nature of the workshops — from students in their 20s, to beloved community elders in their 70s.

Both Mayson and Wisher have had decades of experience developing strategies to help workshop participants feel comfortable being vulnerable in their poetry, a pivotal aspect of the project. Mayson is a licensed clinical social worker, and she says that poetry can be a tool to help reframe one’s thoughts and change the narrative about a situation, a technique that is grounded in her clinical practice.

Wisher’s background as an English teacher in Germantown and the founder of the Germantown Poetry Festival showed her how poetry can open up dialogues between young people, and break down walls within her community.

In order to make the workshops a safe space, Mayson and Wisher lead with vulnerability.

“We always do the writing exercises with the classes that we teach. We’re always writing poems alongside them, and we’re often sharing our poems too — sharing that, Yes we’re poets but this is our first draft. And our first drafts are equally as rough and unpolished. I think it’s really important that we step out of our box to show people how to model vulnerability as a poet,” Wisher says.

Another strategy they use is starting workshops off with a group exercise, where participants share bits and pieces to build on a story together, before moving on to individual writing and sharing at the end. The prompts are also flexible: participants can use them as written, reorder them, or “take the prompt and throw it out the window.”

Lasting impact

From November 2024 through November 2025, the Healing Verse hotline will be featuring one new poem per week sourced from the workshops, as well as through an open call for poetry on the initiative’s website. As part of the final stage of the project, 20 poems written in the workshops will be transformed into public art installations incorporated throughout Germantown, with the help of a community partner committee.

Marguerite Anglin, the Public Art Director for Creative Philadelphia and an artist herself, explains that “the poetry will inspire” the subsequent installations, along with their locations and mediums. The works will be of different scales to reflect the fact that gun violences impacts people on different levels. During this planning stage, Philadelphia Contemporary’s Rob Blackson is reaching out to local artists — from sculptors and graphic designers, to weavers, florists, and chefs — to think about “unexpected ways” to bring the poems into neighborhood spaces.

When the installations open in spring 2026, Healing Verse Germantown will also offer walking tours throughout the neighborhood so people can experience the artwork and learn the context behind it. Anglin hopes that the works will encourage people to share their experiences with violence and promote healing.

“These public artworks that are visually and physically going to be taking over Germantown are our way of seeing more resistance and the positivity out of all of the negative outcomes of that violence,” Anglin says.

Wisher hopes that the project will also highlight Germantown’s rich literary tradition. In particular, she pointed to a sweatshirt sold at Harriet’s Bookshop emblazoned with the names “Sonia, Ursula, Yolanda, Trapeta” — a reference to herself, Mayson, Philadelphia’s first Poet Laureate Sonia Sanchez, and recording artist and poet Ursula Rucker. The four represent “just a few” of the Black women poets in Germantown.

Wisher says that it’s a tradition they hope to share and contribute to with this project. “There’s a really deep scene here,” she says.“But it’s also Germantown. It’s disproportionately impacted by gun violence. Whenever I look at the news and I see Germantown mentioned in relation to a shooting, it just hurts my heart again and again. I have a 15-year-old son, and it’s something I think about every time he walks out the door. So it’s an inescapable reality amongst all of the vibrancy here.”

Taylor appreciates the program’s focus on the “transformative power of the arts” and its position within the Germantown community. As a business owner, he strives to make his gallery a local access point to the greater art scene of the city.

“The more people partake in it, the more people write about it, the more respect Germantown gets as a vibrant art community and not a dangerous place. It helps to change the narrative of the environment as a whole,” Taylor says.

Mayson adds that one of the greatest things about the project is that so many people on the team, including herself and Wisher, are longtime Germantown residents eager to share and uplift the “beautiful, green, diverse community” that they know and love.

“The most important perspective I want to really shape is other people on the team, as they see themselves as artists, as poets, as public art practitioners. Because then if you’re focusing on that, there’s less focus on all the other things that are informing some of the trauma that we have experienced,” Mayson says.

COVERAGE OF LOCAL POETS AND POETRY FROM THE CITIZEN