Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Series

We are excited to partner with Seattle Arts & Lectures to support the publication of the Seattle Youth Poet Laureates’ first collections.

The Seattle Youth Poet Laureate program aims to identify young writers and leaders who are committed to civic and community engagement, poetry and performance, and leadership and education across Seattle.

The Youth Poet Laureate is a program of Urban Word, an award-winning literary arts and youth development organization, presented nationwide in partnership with local youth arts associations and leading national arts groups, including the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, PEN Center USA, and Cave Canem.

YPL 2023–24

Dear Spanish
Mateo Acuña
June 2024
$14.00
38 pp.

Celebrate the launch of Dear Spanish on June 24!

The ninth collection in the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Series, Dear Spanish is a tender exploration of the languages of identity, gender, and family. This chapbook was written in partnership with the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate program, a program of Seattle Arts & Lectures.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mateo Acuña is a Peruvian-American poet, writer, and visual artist who splits his time between Auburn and Seattle, Washington. He is the 2023–2024 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate and the 2024–2026 Auburn Poet Laureate, a SPOKES intern at Youth Speaks, a member of the Washington Arts Youth Leadership Cohort, and a librettist in the Seattle Opera Creation Lab. His and composer Mina Pariseau’s opera, Blood Dawn of the Inti Sun, premiered at Tagney Jones Hall in 2024. He also sells jewelry made from repurposed and recycled materials.

YPL 2022–23

LOVELIKE
Sah Pham
June 2023
$15.95
102 pp.

The eighth collection in the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Series, LOVELIKE is a meditation on all of love’s forms and all the ways love touches our lives: connection, family, lineage, history. This collection was written in partnership with the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate program, a program of Seattle Arts & Lectures.

Praise for LOVELIKE

“LOVELIKE signals a shining new talent. Sah Pham offers deeply felt poems with a captivating voice that conjures the richness and strength won from bonds between daughters and mothers. These poems are a beautiful exploration of connection and resilience—they operate as a guidebook for how to celebrate our most treasured loves.”

—Rena Priest, Washington State Poet Laureate ’21–23

“Sah Pham is a poet of strong and haunting presence. A bright voice both vulnerable and courageous in the search for place, acceptance, and love that’s real. Her words will move you.”

—Kimberly Hill, King County Television station manager

“Sah’s poetry is an inundation of relentless love, convincing even the most heart-bruised and cynical among us to believe in it again and take a good look at the fissures in our own hearts. She helps us see how if you take away the pain, you’re left with an emptier, easier love. But it’s the hard love that is the most meaningful and that you can depend on to see you through the most difficult struggles. This is the kind of poetry that makes you ache; the love in LOVELIKE is holy.”

—Amy Hirayama, WITS Writer, Seattle Arts & Lectures

“Sah Pham’s LOVELIKE is a timely chronology of how love travels through our hearts and souls, capturing all that we share in the world of joy and grief with her poetic voice that speaks for us all.”

—Shawn Wong, author of Homebase and American Knees

“LOVELIKE is a tender, frayed net for us, the shipwrecks: “Let / this be your raft.” As the poems move like tides, Sah Pham carries us through the crevices of a family’s migration, languages spoken and unspoken, and heartbreak. These poems will flow and crash through you, a rejection of the finality of drowning. They are a promise we’ll find love in our ‘shattered parts’ and breathe again.”

—Brian Dang, WITS writer, Seattle Arts & Lectures

“Trying to understand love is like trying to understand the meaning of each breath as we are taking it . . . it’s nearly impossible to conceive of the importance each of those movements has on our being. But Sah Pham attempts to follow those subtleties like a dream she is in the midst of both having and interpreting, and she writes each secret, symbolic message as it whispers to her, I believe, to remind her she is loved.”

—Vicky Edmonds, author of Attempts at Blooming

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sah (also known as Sarah) Pham is the first Vietnamese American Youth Poet Laureate of Seattle. Her poetry has been featured in Seattle’s Child, KUOW 1340 AM radio, and the University of Washington’s The Monologues. She is the founder and former host of Poemcast, a poetry podcast at The Daily. She has served as a Youth Ambassador for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, youth producer with RadioActive Youth Media, and Corbett Scholar at the University of British Columbia. She is an alumna of the University of Washington. LOVELIKE is her first full-length poetry collection.

YPL 2021–22

Spikenard
Zinnia Hansen
May 2022
$15.95
94 pp.

The seventh collection in the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Series, Spikenard is a philosophical contemplation of family, religion, and the reverential observations of an interior mind. This collection was written in partnership with the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate program, a program of Seattle Arts & Lectures.

Praise for Spikenard

“Light on light on light . . . burning beautifully,” Zinnia Hansen makes a shining debut with this luminous collection, a potent distillation of “every beautiful thought at once.”

—Rena Priest, Washington State Poet Laureate ’21–23

“‘I took a hammer/ to my words,/ but forgot the nails,'” Zinnia Hansen writes in her debut collection. As each poem alternately sprawls and condenses, breathes horizontal and compresses down, a form of worship emerges at the nexus of watching a world burn and wondering ‘who is going to cut a hole in the/ horizon and let out the smoke,’ feeling aging turn in on itself and begin again like ‘Russian nesting dolls filled with moist earth,’ and finding reverence in the paradoxes of transcendental awe and a desire ‘to burn the/ garden God planted in my belly.’ The book transforms into its own cathedral of sun and the particular smell of Pacific Northwest trees—and, as it examples how ‘even love is a form of deconstruction,’ you are invited in to be transformed with it.”

—C. R. Grimmer, author of The Lyme Letters

“Zinnia Hansen finds love in artichokes, salmon, and the yellow sign ‘telling you to slow as you drive down our neighborhood road,’ and mystery in the mother who ‘captures the weather of the world in a cup.’ She falls asleep ‘reading about duende; reading, radiating duende’ and struggles to make peace with the body, the question of God, and the persistent uncertainty of belief. Here is a beautiful young mind writing her way into the great conversation. Ready Spikenard and celebrate.”

—Kathleen Flenniken, author of Post Romantic

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zinnia Hansen is Seattle’s 2021/22 Youth Poet Laureate. Zinnia Hansen is a poet and essayist from the Pacific Northwest. She is a first-year student at the University of Washington, studying linguistics. Her work has been published in Blue Marble Review, Young Poets Network, and Ice Lolly Review. She was a finalist in the New York Times Personal Narrative Contest and part of the Hugo House Young Poet’s Cohort.

YPL 2020–21

Motherland
Bitaniya Giday
June 2021
$15.95
60 pp.

The sixth collection in the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Series, Motherland is a breathtaking exploration of womanhood and blackness framed by family, immigration, and history. Giday blends lyric and experimentation to bring her experiences as a first-generation Ethiopian American to life and asks insightful, difficult questions about how we all experience the world. Her combination of traditional storytelling and contemporary influence infuses her poems with a conscious power wielded to invoke the reader’s reflection, consideration, and awareness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bitaniya Giday is a first-generation Ethiopian American residing in Seattle. Her writing explores the nuances of womanhood and blackness, as she reflects upon her family’s path of immigration across the world. She hopes to restore and safeguard the past, present, and future histories of her people through traditional storytelling and poetry.

EVENTS

Coming soon

YPL 2019–20

In the Footsteps of a Thousand Griefs
Wei-Wei Lee
May 2020
$15.00
68 pp.

The fifth collection in the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Series, In the Footsteps of a Thousand Griefs is a thrilling exploration of culture, personhood, empowerment, and grief for the things we must leave behind. Lee’s poems are intimately shaped both by her childhood in Taiwan and her current life in—and love for—Seattle. She shuttles us between continents and years, navigating through those primal relationships that shape the places we call home. Both brave and vulnerable, attentive to sorrow and beauty alike, these poems draw strength from the past even as they question the present, reminding us there is reflective power and honor even in the smallest steps we take toward our future becoming.

Praise for In the Footsteps of a Thousand Griefs

Wei-Wei Lee’s first collection of poems combines the raw elements of emotion, sensation, personal history, and family history and heats them into a molten stream of surprising language. The poems hold you close and tell you secrets. They are brave enough to be vulnerable, to open themselves up and show you who they really are.

—Karen Finneyfrock, author of Ceremony for the Choking Ghost

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wei-Wei Lee grew up in Taiwan but was born in the States, and Seattle is the first city in the States she has ever known and loved. As the 2019/2020 Youth Poet Laureate, she hopes to pay tribute to both Taiwan and America in her writing, and she hopes to do them proud.

EVENTS

Coming soon

YPL 2018–19

Stepwell
Azura Tyabji
May 2019
$15.00
86 pp.

With a shrewd eye and a precise pen, Stepwell asks readers to look closely at their everyday. Genre-blending and genre-bending poems come together to form a collection built around attention, advice, and admonishment. This first book is a bold statement around what it means to live, write, and ask questions of self and city in today’s America.

Praise for Stepwell

A modern-day apostle of unrepentant certitude—to say the least, Tyabji’s stanzas leave little room for the abstract as her style of writing is visceral and calculated. May all the established poets hold (this) new work, by (this) new author closely.

—Anastacia-Renée, Seattle Civic Poet, author of (v.), Forget It, and Answer (Me)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Azura Tyabji serves as the 2018/19 Youth Poet Laureate of Seattle. As a writer, spoken word performer, facilitator, and educator, her poetry is motivated by a love for community, justice, and healing. She writes fearlessly and with documentary precision about the complex realities of contemporary urban life.