West Hollywood City Selects Brian Sonia-Wallace As Next City Poet Laureate

Press release from the City of West Hollywood:

October 22, 2020

The City of West Hollywood’s City Council, at its regular meeting on Monday, October 19, 2020, unanimously approved Brian Sonia-Wallace as the next City Poet Laureate. Brian was selected through an application process with a selection committee comprised of current and former City Poet Laureates and staff members from the West Hollywood Library and West Hollywood City Hall.

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 its annual celebration of National Poetry Month. During a two-year appointment, the City Poet Laureate will also create a new poem each year, which commemorates the uniqueness and dynamism of West Hollywood.

Since the 2014 season of the City’s WeHo Reads program, 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. His 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 to create Pride Poets, a project that 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. 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.

Brian Sonia-Wallace begins his appointment as the City of West Hollywood’s City Poet Laureate on October 20, 2020, taking over from West Hollywood’s third City Poet Laureate, Charles Flowers (2018-2020). Previous City Poet Laureates include: Kim Dower (2016-2018) who solicited lines from hundreds of community members in West Hollywood and weaved those words together into a citywide collaborative poem: “I Sing The Body West Hollywood,” which was turned into a five-minute animated video. Steven Reigns, West Hollywood’s inaugural City Poet Laureate (2014-2016) 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.

The City of West Hollywood has an unwavering commitment to fostering the literary arts. The West Hollywood Library showcases the City’s rich intellectual, literary, and cultural diversity and provides a landmark facility for the community’s passionate commitment to lifelong learning. The City’s Arts Division oversees the WeHo Reads literary series presenting new and noteworthy authors. The City of West Hollywood also supports a Free Little Library grant program and regular Drag Queen Story Hour readings.

For additional information about the City of West Hollywood’s City Poet Laureate program, please visit www.weho.org/arts or contact Michael Che, the City of West Hollywood’s Arts Coordinator, at (323) 848-6377 or at mche@weho.org. For people who are Deaf or hard of hearing please call TTY (323) 848-6496. For up-to-date news and events, follow the City of West Hollywood on social media @WeHoCity and sign up for news updates at www.weho.org/email.

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.

This press release was produced by the City of West Hollywood. The views expressed here are the author’s own.