In the News: The Urban Activist profiles poet and ArtPhilly collaborator Trapeta B. Mayson

The Urban Activist went deep with award-winning poet Trapeta B. Mayson, one of the creative forces behind "Dinner with Dinah," part of What Now: 2026.

Mayson arrived in Philadelphia in 1975 from Monrovia, Liberia. Barely 8 years old, she and her siblings joined their parents living in Germantown. Her father was a day laborer at the steel mills, and her mother was a caregiver; both did their best to raise their children, but it wasn’t always easy. “It was an adjustment, for sure,” Mayson told me on a recent spring evening. Yet, she credits Germantown’s strengths for giving her a solid foundation...

Mayson is working on an immersive, multidisciplinary poetry project called “Dinner with Dinah” about a woman named Dinah who resided in Germantown as both enslaved and free. “In the place where Dinah sat, ate, and communed with family, participants will be immersed in Dinah’s whole life, her husband, her daughter, and their way of being.” Funded by Art Philly and The William Penn Foundation, this one-night-only event will be held on June 6 as part of the What Now: 2026 Festival in Philadelphia. And, it is already sold out. “With all that happens to us and through us in this life,” she said, “we have pain, we have joy. The key is to come out of it with our humanity intact.”

Read the whole story HERE.