Berkeley has found its second-ever poet laureate.
Aya de León, an author, activist and poet who went to Berkeley High School and now teaches at UC Berkeley, is set to serve a two-year term as the “creative ambassador of the city.”
She’ll succeed Rafael González, who in 2017 was appointed the city’s inaugural poet laureate but was given no pay or official duties. González resigned from the honorific role in 2022, and the position has since been reinvented, with more formality, as a joint pilot project of the Berkeley Public Library and the Civic Arts Commission.
De León will receive a $10,000 honorarium. And, in addition to writing one original poem inspired by or related to Berkeley, she will need to coordinate at least two public reading events, recite a poem at up to 10 city or library events and mentor Berkeley’s first-ever Youth Poet Laureate (who will be announced near the end of next month).
“I’m really grateful to be able to have a leadership role in my hometown as an artist,” de León told Berkeleyside. “Artists lead in many powerful ways that are sometimes not visible and acknowledged, so it’s deeply honoring and humbling to get to be a voice in the community and for the community but within the arts.”
She sees the poet laureate position as a way for her to continue her mother’s legacy as an active community leader. Her mother, the civil rights attorney Anna de León, was the first Latina to serve on the Berkeley School Board, the first artist and Latina to serve on the arts commission, once ran for mayor and after ending her law practice, shifted her energies into running jazz clubs around town.
For her poem inspired by Berkeley, de León thinks she’ll likely write about her family’s experience moving to the city.
When she was 3, de León said, her mother moved the two of them from Los Angeles to Berkeley due to the harassment they experienced for seeming like an interracial family; Anna de León, who is Latina and of African heritage, would often be mistaken for white, and she thought that because the Berkeley Unified School District took steps to voluntarily integrate its schools in 1968, she might find a better life for her and her daughter in Berkeley.
“We came to Berkeley fleeing racism, and we definitely got away from the type of racism that was coming for us in Los Angeles,” de León said. “But there are different types of racism, some of which affect everywhere in the country and Berkeley is not immune to this.”
Lately, she has been thinking more and more about what needs to happen in order to retain and support Black presence in Berkeley amid gentrification — in part because she grew up here, but also because she’s now a parent, too. “The biggest thing that I figured out about racism in Berkeley in particular had to do with noticing who isn’t there … who can no longer afford to be there in Berkeley,” she said.
She said she also hopes to use her platform to uplift youth voices, and plans to organize a poetry workshop centered around climate justice, similar to the virtual arts and activism conference she held in 2022 to celebrate Afro-Diasporic fiction, nonfiction and poetry addressing the climate emergency.
In recent years, she’s focused her efforts on writing fiction — including Justice Hustlers, a series of feminist heist novels — while fostering her passion for poetry in her teaching role at UC Berkeley, where she recently taught a class on climate poetry. (Next spring, she’s teaching a class on contemporary hip hop and Black women’s sexuality, in which students will be expected to write rhymes and freestyle rap in class.)
“I love being a novelist — it’s not like it was a second choice, or that it was only economic pressures that led me there,” de León said. But living in a capitalist society makes it “easy to lose touch with poetry,” she added. “I hadn’t realized how much I missed it until recently crafting a poem as the poet laureate.”
De León’s appointment will start Jan. 1 and last through the end of 2025. During the Dec. 6 committee meeting in which her appointment was announced, she presented a spoken word piece about “Black/Palestinian/Jewish solidarity,” which draws song lyrics from Deva Mahal and Stevie Wonder.
González, Berkeley’s first poet laureate, said he was “delighted” that de León, whose mother he’s been friends with for decades, was chosen to replace him, and immediately wrote a poem congratulating her.
One of his earliest memories of de León was in 1983, when she was arrested for blockading the gates of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a weapons research facility, as part of the International Day of Nuclear Disarmament protests. She was 15 years old. Their paths occasionally crossed when she became more active in the local poetry scene. González praised her as a “captivating” and “very fine” poet.
Berkeley’s newly formalized poet laureate program is meant to “champion Berkeley’s rich poetry, spoken word, and literary arts communities” and “continue Berkeley’s historic tradition of Free Speech.”
A selection panel consisting of five poets — MK Chavez, Susan Cohen, Reginald Edmonds, Nia McAllister and California State Poet Laureate Lee Herrick — considered 18 applications, with seven candidates invited to a second interview round. The panel (with the exception of Herrick, who withdrew from the process) unanimously recommended de León for the role.
