CARMIN WONG
Carmin Wong was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and raised in Jamaica, Queens, New York. Her poetry, plays, and research engage with transnational Black identities through written and oral literature. She is pursuing a dual-title PhD in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Penn State. A graduate of Howard University, Carmin earned a BA in English with a minor in playwriting from the Chadwick Boseman College of Fine Arts and was inducted into the Sigma Tau Delta International English Society. She holds an MFA in poetry writing from the University of New Orleans, where she served as an Associate Poetry Editor of Bayou Magazine.
Carmin’s poetry has received recognition from the Academy of American Poets, and she has been awarded grants by Poets & Writers and Jeremy O. Harris and The Bushwick Starr. She has received fellowships from The Watering Hole, Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University; (IRT) Institute for Recruitment of Teachers at Phillips Academy — Andover; and the Cooper-DuBois Mentoring program at Penn State. Recently, her research has been supported with a grant from the Africana Research Center at Penn State.
Carmin’s poetry has been featured on WRBH: Radio for the Blind & Handicapped, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora; The Quarry; Sou'wester; Xavier Review; Antenna.Works, and elsewhere. She has performed at Lincoln Center, Scholastic auditorium, and the Nuyorican Poets Café. Her debut on stage as a playwright took place in 2014 when her monologue, "3 Generations" was selected by the Woolly Mammoth Theater Co. to join in the Women’s Voice Theater Festival: Young Women’s Monologues Competition at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
As a college student in Washington, D.C., Carmin co-led philanthropic community restoration projects in Philipsburg, St. Maarten. Later, as a graduate student in New Orleans, she co-coordinated the “Black Joy and Justice” programming at the 2018 Words and Music Festival and was awarded UNO's 2020 Agnes Levine Memorial Award. Soon after, she became involved with the ACLU of Louisiana and the national ACLU Advocacy Institute. She was also on-boarded as a volunteer Hi-SET/GED instructor at a women's facility at Orleans Parish Prison before COVID-19.
Carmin continues to lead writing workshops for young writers, adjudicate national awards for young writers with Scholastic’s Art & Writing Awards, teach poetry and playwriting courses to young people, and collegiately teach African American literature, and Rhetoric and Composition.
Carmin is the co-author of A Chorus Within Her, produced by Theater Alliance, co-founder of Carmin and Aye’s Prom Giveaway, and founder of Feed Those Without Shelter in NYC.
