The City of West Hollywood will celebrate National Poetry Month in April with a variety of events and exhibitions honoring poets and art of poetry. To read the April poem created by City Poet Laureate Brian Sonia Wallace collaboratively with 53 residents and visitors, click here.

Throughout the month of April, the City of West Hollywood will honor living poets by featuring selections of their poetry on street pole banners along Santa Monica Boulevard. Currently there are 43 poets honored, and each year the West Hollywood City Poet Laureate selects two additional poets to honor. This year’s honorees are Ryka Aoki and Tommy Pico, with an additional banner honoring City Poet Laureate Brian Sonia-Wallace also being added this year.

Ryka Aoki is author of Seasonal Velocities, He Mele a Hilo (A Hilo Song), Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul, The Great Space Adventure, and the forthcoming Light from Uncommon Stars. She is a two-time Lambda Award finalist, and winner of the Eli Coppola Chapbook Contest, the Corson-Bishop Poetry Prize, and a University Award from the Academy of American Poets. Aoki is also the founder of the International Transgender Martial Arts Alliance, and Executive Director of Dissonance Press and The After School programs at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, in Venice, California.

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is author of the books IRL, Nature Poem, Junk, and Feed. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now splits his time between Los Angeles and Brooklyn. He co-curates the reading series Poets with Attitude, is poetry editor at Catapult Magazine, writes on the FX show Reservation Dogs, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub.

On Monday, April 5, 2021 at 6:00 p.m., the City Council of the City of West Hollywood will, at its regular meeting, issue a commemorative National Poetry Month proclamation, which will be received by West Hollywood City Poet Laureate Brian Sonia-Wallace. The presentation will take place online and is viewable on the WeHo Arts YouTube Channel. West Hollywood City Poet Laureate will also debut a new poem he has created which combines lines submitted by 53 West Hollywood residents and visitors.  The poem will also be available to view on the City’s WeHo Arts YouTube channel and the text can be found at the bottom of this page.

On Wednesday, April 7, 2021 at 6 p.m., as part of the City’s WeHo Reads series, there will be a poetry reading and conversation about representation in relation to the history of the local LGBTQ rights movement with Gustavo Hernandez, a poet with a new poetry collection Flower Grand First, and Rocío Carlos, author of the (other) house whose work was included in LACMA’s Pacific Standard Time exhibition, Those of This America. The event also features musical guests Mariachi Arcoiris de Los Angeles, who have as part of their group the very first openly transgender female in the history of mariachi. The event, titled Exploring The Landscape of the Gay Rights Movement, will take place online and is free to attend. For more information and to RSVP: www.weho.org/wehoreads.

On Wednesday, April 14, 2021 at 6 p.m., as part of the City’s WeHo Reads series, West Hollywood City Poet Laureate Brian Sonia-Wallace brings together poets near and far for an exploration of thresholds in language, gender, generation, and geography. Featured poets include Terry Wolverton, Alyesha Wise-Hernandez, féi hernandez, Alan Pelaez Lopez and Harry Giles. The event will culminate in writing prompts to get your creative juices flowing and a virtual afterparty for participants to share their work. The event, titled “It is time to cross the threshold on your hands” (after a line by poet Kayleigh Zaloga), will take place online and is free to attend. For more information and to RSVP: www.weho.org/wehoreads.  

On Fridays and Saturdays through the month of April, with the support of the City of West Hollywood’s Arts Division, Greenway Arts Alliance will present the annual L.A. Get Down Festival. The festival is a celebration of hip hop and spoken word, presented in association with Da Poetry Lounge.  Most events are $10.  For tickets and more information, please visit http://greenwaycourttheatre.org/lagetdown2021.

The City of West Hollywood began its City Poet Laureate program in 2014, with each poet serving for a two-year term. The City Poet Laureate serves as an ambassador of West Hollywood’s vibrant literary culture and leads the promotion of poetry in the City, including assisting with its annual celebration of National Poetry Month.           

Brian Sonia-Wallace began his appointment in October 2020 following West Hollywood’s third City Poet Laureate, Charles Flowers (2018-2020). Previous City Poet Laureates include Kim Dower (2016-2018) who initiated the Citywide Collaborative Poem, the first of which was animated into a five-minute-long video: “I Sing The Body West Hollywood” and Steven Reigns, West Hollywood’s inaugural City Poet Laureate (2014-2016), who implemented the City’s annual Poetry Month street banner project, which honors living poets and brings snippets of poetry into the streets of West Hollywood.

Since WeHo Reads 2014, Brian Sonia-Wallace has been writing poems for strangers and neighbors on the streets of West Hollywood and at City of West Hollywood events. A social practice poet straddling the lines between literature and community engagement, his 2020 debut from Harper Collins, The Poetry of Strangers: What I Learned Traveling America With a Typewriter, was lauded as “full of optimism and wide-eyed wonder” by The New York Times. He teaches creative writing through the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and Get Lit - Words Ignite. In 2019, Brian received a grant from the City of West Hollywood’s One City One Pride LGBTQ Arts Festival to create Pride Poets, a project which brought poets on typewriters to the streets of West Hollywood to create over 700 original works based on one-on-one interactions, and in 2020 brought together over 100 LGBTQ+ poets for virtual shows during the COVID-19 quarantine. Pride Poets has been featured in The Pride and The Advocate, and Brian’s work has additionally been profiled by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Poetry Foundation, NPR, ABC7, and Telemundo. The motto of his company, RENT Poet (as featured on NPR’s How I Built This), is “everyone needs a poem.” Brian also has an intriguing resume of past projects with public interactions, including being Artist-in-Residence or Writer-in-Residence for the Mall of America, Amtrak, Dollar Shave Club, the City of Los Angeles, and Boston Harbor Islands National Park.

For additional information about the City of West Hollywood’s National Poetry Month activities or City Poet Laureate program, please contact Mike Che, the City of West Hollywood’s Arts Coordinator, at mche@weho.org. 

by West Hollywood City Poet Brian Sonia-Wallace, 

created collaboratively with 53 West Hollywood residents & visitors

the sunset strip 

echoes. jacarandas bloom bright 

after barren months.

our streets will symphony again

wild beyond gardens,

blaze honey disco

french horns & orange sherbet glow.

you, dear, never stopped

being a proud march, a palm 

frond in ragged wind —

yes, you curled up

in last winter’s hush.

this city threads our lonely 

heartbeats, a plastic oasis of skin

sweaty in starlight.

but now it’s time for

gogo boots & guitar strings, 

rooftop pools & history between your lips

like a cold margarita 

while the hot asphalt 

dances! 

west hollywood a song:

equal parts party and protest.

one sings into the other.

it’s time to line each boulevard anew

with our delicious strangeness,

to glitter every tree.

won’t you walk with me?

my glam aunts, my ferocious uncles,

my frankest friends — my chosen family,

look at all that we have lost

and all that survives.