A B O U T

Teré  Fowler-Chapman BFA, MTA (he/they)

cultural worker | educator | youth advocate

They are either pulling poems off their pages, blacking out/cutting up images from old worlds, or making new worlds through intuitive card-making. Their work centers on blackness, trans identity, queerness, spirituality, and sobriety. When they share their work with the community: they hope their art has a heartbeat and tongue that engages folx in discourse. They describe their home as wherever their heart is. They look to plant creative expression through workshops, exhibits, and performances. They have a special place in their heart for planting poems behind bars with incarcerated youth. If they are doing a workshop, you can bet some inner child work, meditation, play, and creative expression are involved. They are always in somebody's classroom crafting poems. They believe they learn much more from the future generation and feel blessed to cultivate a body of work that allows them to learn the power of vulnerability by fostering others' work. In the name of a better future, they reluctantly work with adults to foster inclusive and equitable youth spaces by exploring their biases and privileges. To balance this, they also do workshops around self-care and inner child work with some pretty dope folx in the community.

"My journey in education as a cultural worker has focused on three pedagogical principles: provide support for marginalized students; balance students' personal and academic growth; and center their experiential knowledge in any curriculum ."

E X P E R I E N C E 

Teré has a BFA from Southern New Hampshire University and over 160+ Professional Development Hours from the following institutions: University of Arizona Poetry Center, National Arts Strategies, Harvard University, Arizona Department of Education, University of Arizona College of Education, Vallecitos Mountain Retreat Center, KORE Institute, Child and Family Resources, Teach Like a Champion, UA Wildcat Writers, and more. However, their biggest lessons have come from BIPOC femme, and LGBTQIA+ identified community members, elders, and black youth. Their unique academic journey allowed them to tailor their studies to specifically focus on the sustainability of under-supported, non-traditional, and marginalized youth. They have over eight years of performance and community organizing experience as a cultural worker. They have performed and facilitated workshops using creative writing and gender-inclusive pedagogy.

From 2012 to 2018, they founded and hosted Words on the Avenue, Tucson's longest-running community poetry open mic. This community-funded project provided immeasurable financial support to uplifting POC folx in the Tucson community and beyond. This project was also the first in the local literary arts community to establish a restorative protocol that provided a supportive space for people who experienced sexual harassment and violence. Their protocol was survivor-led and supported un-negotiable accountability for inflicted sexual violence within the Tucson literary community. 2014 they became the first black trans-Executive Director of the Tucson Poetry Festival (Est. 1981). In this position, they collaborated with their board to recruit and curate art and poetry events centered around a yearly theme. They often were passionate about finding artists whose poetic work may not have been considered poetry. 

In 2014, Teré began teaching at a local charter high school, where he co-created a pilot program, The Spokenword, a year-long curriculum that used poetry to interconnect social justice, community healing, and hip hop in the classroom. In the next five years, Teré worked with other staff to establish the following programs: revised and reintroduced the mentor homeroom program, hip hop club, gender sexuality alliance club, spoken word club, dismantled and revisioned the cohort to align with experiential success, established a celebratory bell-system to acknowledge the graduation of non-traditional students, co-established the JAG after graduation program, and Customized Academic Track, an evening credit recovery program. They also designed and developed the Creative English curriculum, a gender-inclusive health curriculum, and an economic entrepreneurship curriculum. Tere's work as both an artist and educator has fostered community support from PBS/NPR Arizona Public Media, TEDx Tucson, and The University of Arizona, and has caught the attention of bell hooks and more. Their classroom was also one of six nationwide recognized by the National Book Foundation in 2018.

"I believe the radical practice of curiosity defines learning."

By 2019, Teré finished this chapter in their life as the assistant principal. During this school year, their team received their first "A" from the Department of Education. In 2019, they transitioned to another local charter school. One semester, he revised the student handbook, established equitable student processing practices, facilitated a cultural competency audit, and suggested that a culturally competent consultant address this school's culture before taking six months to focus on themselves. After overcoming an extensive amount of adversity, Tere’s focus shifted to studying unprocessed trauma's impact and uncovering roads to recovery.

At the end of the 2020 school year, he started teaching young adults on the autism spectrum creative writing, social, and emotional support through social justice, acceptance, and commitment through a therapeutic lens.  Tere returned to school and completed his bachelor’s degree in creative writing. During the pandemic, he began focusing on visual artwork to process. He unexpectedly had his first art exhibitions at & the Gallery, the University of Arizona Museum of Art, and The Splinter Collective. In 2023, he published his first full-length through R&R Press titled M O O N S H i N E. He serves the NW Denver, Colorado, high school community as their academic program manager. On college campuses, he teaches academic preparedness and social and emotional wellness and removes systematic barriers so high school students can experience and achieve academic success. When he isn’t at work, he seasonally mentors teaching artists as they work with incarcerated and undersupported youth, teaches poetry as a healing modality at the Hugo House in Seattle, and facilitates spaces showing young people poetry's power. He is also working on completing his MEd with a concentration on advanced teaching.

S E L F    P R E S E R V A T I O N

When they aren't creating, they are spending time with their amazing and loving wife and supporting the important work she does in the world, going to therapy, binge-watching some reality television show or True Crime, traveling the world, cooking something divine, reminding themselves they are worthy, playing Pickleball, scrolling through Tik Tok and YouTube episodes, or tending to their loved ones and pets. • Teré Fowler-Chapman licenses all work under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.