West Hollywood's City Poet Laureate highlights the City of West Hollywood through the literary arts and, over a period of time, creates a new body of literary work that commemorates the diversity and vibrancy of the City. He serves as an official ambassador of West Hollywood’s vibrant literary culture, promoting poetry in West Hollywood, stimulating the transformative impact of poetry in the local community, and creating excitement about the written word.

Brian Sonia-Wallace, our fourth West Hollywood City Poet Laureate, served from October 2020- October 2023.

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. Brian's writing has been published in The Guardian and Rolling Stone, and 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 (now called the WeHo 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.

In 2021, Brian Sonia-Wallace was selected as one of the recipients of the Poets Laureate Fellowship by the Academy of American Poets in conjunction with his role as West Hollywood City Poet Laureate. The Academy provided each of the 23 Fellows $50,000 each, and more than $100,000 in total to 14 local 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations that have agreed to support the Fellows’ proposed projects, including the local organization Being Alive, which supported Sonia-Wallace’s project.

For more information about the City of West Hollywood's City Poet Laureate program, please contact Mike Che, Arts Coordinator, at mche@weho.org.

 City Poet Laureate Brian Sonia-Wallace photo by Nayeli Knudsen

After the Music, 2021

 

Praise the Zoom call.

You’re on mute, love!

Can’t hear you — 

(secretly) Praise (the bad) connection.

 

Praise our home offices, our home schools,

our home gyms, our closed bars, our kitchen dances,

our cooking fails, our odd jobs. Our rented 

U-Hauls. Our promises to stay.

 

In a workshop (online, duh), my friend Dorsay,

a resplendent seventy five, crowned in Diana Ross curls,

shares her poem: butterflies, a lover’s caress 

and then — Why should I not want to just die?

 

She seeded concerts across the city for decades. 

Now, it’s impossible to sing together. Everyone is slightly 

out of time. What happens after the music? 

We gape and stammer, but Dorsay — 

 

she booms laughter, claps her hands. 

We’re here aren’t we? However we gather, 

it’s a party. Our face parade, through lag and crash, and latency,

logging on against erasure. I’ll be there

 

next week, writes Dorsay. A late night promise.

The next morning, bougainvillea shocks pink 

across the sidewalk. I leave the Russian bakery 

with a loaf of black Borodinsky rye.

 

Praise the long walk, with no end. The right now.

Our newly fragiled bodies.

That awkward, grateful way we hold each other

at any distance.

 

Is it too early to celebrate?, 2021

 by West Hollywood City Poet Brian Sonia-Wallace, 

created collaboratively with 53 WeHo 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.

 

WeHowl, 2022

After Howl by Allen Ginsberg

A collaborative poem created by West Hollywood City Poet Laureate Brian Sonia-Wallace using lines submitted by 56 residents and visitors about their favorite memories of West Hollywood in 2022.

 

I saw the fashionistas and gogo dancers of my generation emerge after being driven indoors by plague, their ravenous bread-making fulfilled,

dragging themselves past OnlyFans at dawn looking for their rent, buying standing desks, folding in their loneliness, bedheaded scenesters burning for each other on dog walks, through zooms, finally unmasked —

Who went to Micky’s just days before the world shut down, broke the white picket fence with Britney Spears, nursed hangovers at the French Market,

Who became fast friends watching season 1 of the L-Word, walked into a now-defunct Lesbian bar, embraced their sexual orientation, who are still here, though The Standard is not

Who saw the sky and wandered through, in between sweaty skin and spilled well drinks that stuck their pineapple to the floor like lips that don't quite let go,

Who met a boy in a Jeep while driving down Santa Monica Boulevard,

Who greedily assented,

Who discovered rent control and were able to stay,

Who floated under the still starlight at the Hollywood Riviera,

Who had waayyy too much tequila on Halloween at Marix where the waiter was dressed like Liza Minnelli

Who walked before dusk, cars flying by on Santa Monica, dipping into Barney’s for quick coffee and eggs 

Who saw Iman and Bowie at the checkout line at Gelson’s,

Who lived inside history,

Who roller skated down Crescent Heights just after Fountain, when everything just got so fast, who couldn’t stop and rolled and flew all the way down where the street curves and crashed — who got cleaned up by the elderly Russian ladies who raced out of their stores to help.

Who can’t share, this is a PG poem, who were too drunk to remember, who can’t tell you ’cause they’d blush.

Hank! I am with you in West Hollywood where clear skies echo rhythm and harmony.

I’m with you in West Hollywood where you reignited the creativity you’d placed on the back burner.

I’m with you in West Hollywood where you showed up to Pride as Lady Godiva in 6-inch heels and a white cord dress with nothing underneath.

I’m with you in West Hollywood near where Aldous Huxley had a house on Kings Road; Andy Warhol showed his soup cans on La Cienega, and silent movie technicians filled the bungalows along what’s now the Norma Triangle at the birth of film.

I am with you in West Hollywood & down the road after, in the back booth at Canter’s waiting for our order while staring at the ceiling — 3 a.m.

I’m with you in West Hollywood where you get an accidental gig in a coffee shop, the kind of regular gig that lasts 10 years. O Rooftop Pool! O man with the Free Hugs sign! O Oscar party, O resplendent shades of yellows, golds, and white!

I’m with you in West Hollywood where the streets fill with dancing, where Koontz Hardware feels like home, where you sing off Laurel as you bring in oranges from your trees in the backyard.

I’m with you in West Hollywood in my dreams you wander Sunset from sunset to sunrise.

 

The Comfort Ghosts

Written by Brian Sonia-Wallace for the Knoxville Gay Men’s Choir in 2019, set to music by Saunder Choi

 

They are all here,

generations of elder queers with crooked hands

like trees. I shake my whole self at the giant’s trunk.

The forest glistens. A world built on invisible

shimmers suddenly in the light.

If only the roots could see the budding sky.

If only I could garden my history so deep.

This is strength.

This is pride.

To be burned, emptied.

To stand tall, anyway,

play host to new branches,

fresh green,

a forest with a single

root system.

Whatever they say of us, let them say,

we didn’t do this alone.