Carmin Wong

Professional Bio

Carmin Wong is a Guyanese-born poet·organizer, playwright, and dual-title ph.d candidate in english Lit·orature 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 is currently a #DigBlk fellow and the #Harper200 Poetry Project Coordinator. 

Her poetry has been recognized by the Academy of American Poets, featured in Obsidian, Xavier Review, Sou’wester, The Quarry, and broadcast on NPR/ WPSU, and WRBH radio. She is co-author of the stage plays A Chorus Within Her (Theater Alliance) and What Does Purple Sound Like? (Pennsylvania State University), and playwright of Finding Home: Adeline Lawson Graham, Colored Citizen of Bellefonte, which centers untold narratives of 19th-century free Black Pennsylvanians. Her work has been performed at the Apollo, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

A recipient of artist grants from Poets & Writers, Scholastic, Jeremy O. Harris and The Bushwick Starr, Carmin has also held fellowships with Furious Flower, The Watering Hole, and the Wild Seeds Writers Retreat. She served as the 2025 Shirley Graham Du Bois Creative in Residence with Castle of Our Skins and 2025 Teaching Artist with Girls Write Now. Carmin teaches poetry writing to justice-impacted students across jails, prisons, and juvenile detention centers, and also in K–12 schools, college classrooms, and community programs.

Learn more at theCarminWong.com.