Long Beach Youth Poet Laureates Give Voice to a Generation
Are the kids all right?
It’s not an easy question to answer. As people try to live their lives amid what could be considered one of the most chaotic times in American history, or the world, the youth are trying to exist, go to school, do their extracurricular activities, learn, and grow. Based on the remarkable Long Beach Youth Poet Laureate Showcase Reading last month, these youth are all right. However, their profound poetry was a call to action — and help — on the truths that they revealed about their lives in the world today.
The Long Beach Youth Poet Laureates presented their showcase reading at the Billie Jean King Library. The event was hosted by Long Beach poet and YPL fellow Nancy Lynée Woo, who swiftly acknowledged the depth of work the current cohort has managed to create through the global chaos of the past year.
“As their mentor, of course, I’d love to uplift them and their work,” said Woo. “In the midst of chaos, authoritarianism, propaganda, military kidnapping and killing people, loss of civil liberties, defunding social services, wars, and a never-ending stream of rage-inducing news, this is where we are.”
YPL Program
Entering its third year, the Youth Poet Laureate or YPL program invites young poets to use their voices for creativity, leadership and social impact. The program is open to all backgrounds and emphatically encourages underrepresented voices. Supported by Long Beach Forward and connected to the national Urban Word network, the program empowers participants to develop their craft, lead community initiatives and represent the city through poetry and activism. Amanda Gorman was identified by Urban Word as the Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate in 2014 and the inaugural National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017, during which time she read at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. The program looks for poets who have a passion for civic engagement, leadership, service, equity and justice.
“Poets are not the people who shy away from talking about what is real,” Woo said. “ … they have all been writing through the chaos, powerful, honest, vulnerable, striking work.”
The following are poetry excerpts from this year’s Youth Poet Ambassadors: Eden S. Gonzalez, Maddox Harris, Macuilquiahuitl Ixeh and Adele Odette. The last poetry excerpt is from the 2025-2026 Youth Poet Laureate, Ezequiel Correa.
Maddox Harris, aka Future Star, 18 years old, Long Beach City College
Harris’ first poem, Love Prayer, showed a remarkably compassionate love for another, seemingly beyond the qualitative experience of an 18-year-old. Indeed, it was a prayer, delivered by a knowing heart.
His next poem, Colonized Props, revealed more depth with the young Harris delivering battle-scarred expressions, as if he had lived through the Antebellum South.
Here is an excerpt:
Let my people go
God
Please
Listen
God, I pray beyond my flesh
For my people to flourish like master’s fields
To grace them with the peace of the promised land
For every day and night we dread our tears
From 40 days and 40 nights
To 40 years
I pray it doesn’t become 400 more
Revolution is here
Revolution was here.
But you know
Truth on this plantation is a dead man’s game …
Adele Odette, 16 years old, Polytechnic High School
Woo introduced Odette as someone who is so deeply concerned about the world around her. She brings empathy and holistic thinking to all of her work and her poems are able to touch the reader deeply and possibly even into action.
Odette’s first poem was about the Feb. 14, 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The intensity of her delivery and the emotions it elicited, with approving finger snaps and audible audience reaction, was palpable.
Parkland excerpt:
It’s been eight years and we hold on to anger and tears. They sit at the back of our eyes like rock-hard pearls, shaped by the sharpest grains of sand that have somehow created these objects. The universe is a strange and foreboding place, each of us eventually floating up to heaven saddled on a star. Today, eight years have passed and hopefully the seventeen new stars that reached the sky that horrible day are finding some kind of peace …
Macuilqulahuitl Ixeh, 18 years old, Blue Ridge Academy
Woo noted this poet never fails to instill a sense of awe when encountering his work. He brings a sense of puzzle and play into his work in the form of riddles, experimental form and humor.
Ixeh read four powerful poems. His first one, which was very visual, was a contrapuntal, featuring two or more columns of text that can be read individually, or horizontally across to create multiple simultaneous narratives or voices.
His second work highlights his playful side within our upside down world.
World Upside Down
It seems the world’s turned upside down!
No longer do the conspiracies I used to believe sound so impossible.
If hebephiles can rule the planet behind a bloody curtain
Then man did not land on the moon.
If my planet can be held in the palms of only a few McDucks
Then aliens have to be real there’s no way around it.
If one carotenomic geriatric bends the new Reich to his will
Then maybe Hitler never actually shot himself.
If rallies can be held to tell Young White Male Men to not let themselves be talked down to
Then the great pyramids must have been constructed by alien beings
The world’s turned upside down.
And I don’t know what conspiracies are
actually real
Eden S. Gonzalez, 14 years old, McBride High School
Woo noted Gonzalez as one who possesses wisdom beyond her years. “A fiery spirit with a gentle heart, her poetry is powerful, self-aware, … transformative. A voice the world truly needs.”
Gonzalez’s first poem came with a content warning: suicide, mental illness, brief descriptions of overdose and starvation. The poet asked people to raise their hands if they were a student, teacher, school staff member, parent, or guardian. And if anyone was a nonprofit worker, librarian, or library worker to also raise their hand.
What all these people have in common, Gonzalez explained, is budget cuts; they are happening everywhere you look.
Two days before she wrote this poem, she saw a girl attempt suicide. A day before she wrote this poem, she was told that Long Beach Unified School District’s wellness centers would be cut from the district’s budget and would be open part time or completely closed.
“The wellness center saved that girl’s life and many more; that program is the one my district deemed expendable,” said Gonzalez. “Countless stories like mine are everywhere, in libraries and school districts across the nation. In colleges and nonprofits and so many other places that are relied on and need that funding.”
Wellness Is Parallel to Rath
I am not well
We are not well
The kids are crying
Lying in their graves
They can see no future through the morning fog
The kids are dying!
Tears drying
No calls for help now
Only family and friends forced to live in a child’s epilogue
We know you’re ashamed of us
We’re the statistic you leave out of your
brochures
After all
Parents want to know the districts success rate
Not the suffering it ensures
Not the neglect you infect …
… So know that when all isn’t well
Wellness turns to rath
You do the math
It’s you who will be left to save the aftermath
Long Beach Youth Poet Laureate Ezequiel Correa, 18 years old, McBride High School
Woo recalled meeting Correa and being immediately impressed by his initiative and maturity.
Correa expressed gratitude for being the culminating reader for this event.
“Hearing all the poets for this final/not so final time has brought me the motivation to go on for this year,” said Correa. “As a writer, as a scholar, as a worker, I am motivated by people around me who choose themselves over empire.”
For his second poem, titled Peace, Correa said, it “reminded him of journalists and protesters who cover the scenes of downtown Los Angeles and the riots, or the travesties of Palestine, or the war in Lebanon and Sudan, and all these scenes we frankly have the privilege of only being able to see through the television screen. I am so moved by all of it …”
I would like for peace to know who we are
But I’m scared that we will never be the same when we do
Why does it matter for me to know what peace is
When the two-year-old boy’s hollow chest pleads for love?
Love cures all
But where is it when there is no longer anyone alive to tell him he’ll be okay?
Peace is nothing when the pen has been bested by man’s sword
And the smears of ink have instead become the clouds of the atomic bomb, the tanks and
assault rifles
What happens when peace has settled for the tortured silence of the ICE truck?
Where does peace go when everywhere you see is the United States of America?
Peace was the sound of freedom
But peace is war…
A youth poet laureate is not just a writer, but an activist, community leader, and performer who must be evaluated on both analysis of the “page” (written craft) with the “stage” (performance art). These four ambassadors and youth poet laureate, even through the chaos, embody excellence in their artistic craft.
Details: https://www.longbeach.gov/library/learn/youth-poet-laureate