Mayda del Valle and avery r. young, Chicago’s first two poets laureate/Photo: Sulyiman Stokes, courtesy of avery r. young
avery r. young starts talking about a picture of him from years ago and a poem he’d written equally long ago. He laughs with recognition of this younger self. Mayda del Valle smiles along on her screen.
“We were babies,” avery says of when they met. “Like a long time. Ninety-five.”
“That long ago?” Mayda asks with a wide-eyed look of equal recognition.
During Mayda and avery’s recollections, they share old-friend laughs, accountings of open mics and familiar haunts—The Velvet Lounge, Ford City Mall, the Green Mill—and postulations about poetry’s place in Chicago. “I was surrounded by arts organizing—these amazing people of color who were doing really, really dope, progressive, way ahead of their time stuff,” Mayda says, then turns to avery. “One of the first times that you got up on stage, I was at the Guild Complex.
“They’d started a program called the University of Hip-Hop,” she continues, avery nodding. “I was there at the infancy of that program. I was sixteen years old. We were the ones who were like, ‘We want hip-hop programming here. We want graffiti classes, we want breakdance classes,’ you know? And there were the mentors who sustained us.”
“We were mentored and influenced by Mama Gwendolyn Brooks, Mama Maria McCray,” avery says, “and then we went to build communities and teach and mentor. I think that’s the beauty of this whole story; how these appointments come out of the woodwork.” By “appointments,” avery is referring to the title he and Mayda share–Chicago Poet Laureate—as much as he is speaking about arts lineage.
Poets laureate are ambassadors not just for poetry but for arts and culture in general and the people who create and consume them. Being a poet has, historically, meant gathering people; it hasn’t always been a solitary endeavor, and to be an ambassador-poet with a structured role is an important social responsibility.
Chicago’s Poet Laureate program began in 2023 as a collaboration among the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) and the Chicago Public Library (which shared its 150-year anniversary celebration with the laureateship’s beginning), with support from the Poetry Foundation. “When Chicago began building its Poet Laureate program,” writes DCASE acting commissioner Kenya Merritt, “the goal was clear: to honor our city’s singular literary legacy while building a model rooted in national best practices and local expertise.” The Chicago program drew insight from programs in cities like Dallas, Houston and Los Angeles, as well as the State of Illinois and the Library of Congress. Input from an external review committee led to establishing a “clear and separate budget for the laureate’s workplan implementation, which is one of the elements that sets Chicago’s program apart.”
avery r. young performing at Music Under Glass/Photo: Sulyiman Stokes
The Chicago laureate is chosen by a review committee of community leaders in culture and the arts, given a $70,000 honorarium over two years for their poetry and presence, and tasked with developing a public program series. “Poetry is everywhere, and that includes a place in the public square,” writes Ydalmi Noriega, vice president of programs and engagement at the Poetry Foundation.
In a package of minutes there is this We.
How beautiful.
—Gwendolyn Brooks, “An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire”
Gwendolyn Brooks’ example is a model for the structure and selection process of Chicago’s program. Brooks is both Chicago’s patron poet and, with a thirty-two-year reign of love in Illinois, the “Queen of all Laureates,” according to today’s Illinois State Poet Laureate Mark Turcotte. “If I consider the recent examples,” Mark says, “I’m inspired to find ways to make poetry and words available to all Illinoisans.”
A laureate’s work is specific to their place as well as their people’s history and relationship to poetry, whether they’re part of a state, city, nation, tribal nation or a street or bar (which Mark has heard tell of). “From the rumblings I hear across the country, I think that being Illinois’ Poet Laureate provides more room to breathe than, say, being a city laureate where things are more compressed,” Mark says. “Hats off to our Chicago laureates.”
Because of our rich literary scene and tradition, it feels like the Chicago Poet Laureate needs to be a many-hatted polymath—a writer, a performer, a teacher, a program leader, and an activist, at the very least. Mayda Del Valle, the second appointed laureate after avery r. young, performed at New York’s Nuyorican Poets Cafe in 2001 and won the National Poetry Slam that same year. Among other accolades, Smithsonian Magazine named her one of America’s Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences and O, The Oprah Magazine featured her in the first “O Power List” honoring women making marks in their fields.
him yell O. My. God
This is great. You’re a natural. & i laf
when de light in front of me starts
Poppin & den i laf dat i’m laffin—avery r. young, “when de uncola photographer instruct(s) me to smile”
Mayda has a commanding, relentless performance style that you can’t look away from. In her performance at “Legends of Poetry,” for instance, she blends English and Spanish with singing, litanies of the dead and of atrocity, and a fierce interrogation of colony, empire and tradition in a rhythmic polemic. Her poem in her body works like a contemporary and fully-watchable prayer, a spell, “a hurricane that changes everything.”
avery, too, is a magnetic performer with a near-chaotic energy underpinning his style. His poem-film “emmett (til de remix)” invokes ancestors, fiercely explores empire and involves a lot of singing. Among other publications and performances, avery is the composer and librettist of “safronia,” a work that will premiere in April at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the author of “neckbone,” a collection of visual poetry.
“I use everything I can to make a poem,” avery says of his work. Both avery and Mayda teach poetry as a tool for self-expression and arts organizing. Amidst the maddening “rush to eliminate every modifier” by certain political interests, Avery says poetry is a tool for honesty. “If you want to know what really happened in 2025, you have to read the poems that people wrote.”
An evening celebrating Chicago Poet Laureate Mayda A. Del Valle in G.A.R. Hall in the Chicago Cultural Center; January 2026.
These first Chicago Poets Laureate have brought poetry into the public sector, where it becomes more than art; it becomes an account and embodiment of life. Avery was not at all surprised that Mayda was selected, and after talking with them, neither am I. “We didn’t write poems and stay home,” avery says. “We were in the streets.” They were in the city’s poetry, which became a part of them. Mayda’s got this title (and a budget) now, but, like Gwendolyn Brooks and those before them, she and avery were already among Chicago’s poetry ambassadors. “We’re a city where public institutions understand that writers and artists matter to the quality of life in the city,” writes Chicago Public Library commissioner Chris Brown.
Poets laureate have to connect community with poetry, and definitions of poetry run a wide range. A performer who can create a recording of their work is, in 2026, more likely to pull community together than one who’s just a “book poet,” as avery and Mayda consider them in discussion. By the same token, a poet who can mentor and teach in the community—in neighborhoods more than in the academy—can encourage people to see themselves in poetry. The second directive of the Chicago Poet Laureate, right after enhancing the appreciation of poetry, is raising awareness of poetry’s civic importance.
Importance can mean as many things as poetry means. Even silly poetry is important when you consider it a shared expression of lived experience—a story of “one day, this happened,” as avery puts it. Mark Turcotte says that his experience of America as a Native person shapes what he prioritizes as a laureate. “My vulnerable beginnings make me different in everything I hope to accomplish,” he says. “I come from people who have often been denied opportunities to speak for themselves, and I’m looking for ways to bring back into fashion the idea of expressing one’s identity and history.”
The freedom to express one’s experience is a right well-exercised through poetry. Poetry isn’t something you have to learn in order to do it. Poetry is playing with words, and children often do it as well as adults. When we free ourselves and our imagination in language, our experience becomes expressible—and expression changes the world. Poetry, as Mayda has put it before, “imagines what’s possible.”
“From Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes at the Hall Branch in Bronzeville, recent visits by U.S. Poets Laureate Ada Limón and Joy Harjo, to workshops and performances with avery r. young and moments like our Poetry Fest each April,” Chicago poets have met readers in city library branches for generations, writes Chris Brown. “It makes sure poetry isn’t abstract, but something people encounter where they live.”
“Poetry is way more accessible than people think it is.” avery says this in the familiar sing-songy way: “the first poem that anybody ever learns is the alphabet.
ABCD/
EFG/
HIJK/
LMNOP.
It’s taught in rhyme and meter and that’s Shakespeare. That’s poetry.”
As a child I danced
among the long, jangle legs of
the men, down
beside the whispering moccasin women,
in close circles
around the Old Ones,
who sat at the drum,
their heads tossed, backs arched
in ancient prayer.—Mark Turcotte, “Flies Buzzing”
Mark Turcotte speaks in Springfield, Illinois, with Governor Pritzker laughing behind him./Photo courtesy of Mark Turcotte
I’d thought I was going to ask these laureates if it’s hard to get people interested in poetry. That would have been the wrong phrasing. As Mark Turcotte says, the laureateship is a process of discovering what your people already know and care about. It feels more like avery and Mayda know that people care about poetry but they maybe don’t think what they’re doing is poetry, that what they’re feeling and how they say it can be validated using that word. But poetry’s not just for people who read books. “The poem also has to come out of your body to other bodies,” avery says. Making the poem a text is only some of the work, and making it a book is only a thing for some poets. Some poets make poems out of graffiti, Mayda says. Once you see graffiti as poetry, you see that “poeffiti” everywhere.
“And what is a tag but an identity poem?” avery pronounces.
“That’s it,” Mayda applauds, “Break it down. It’s I am.”
The Chicago Poet Laureate program is finding its footing and voice. “The City of Chicago as the managing entity is continuously challenged to think differently (and often times bigger) than we had originally,” DCASE’s Merritt says. The scale and infrastructure Chicago offers also create sweeping opportunities for the laureate. “At a time when stories are being challenged, histories are being questioned, and voices are too often marginalized, the spoken and written word matter more than ever.”
“The Poet Laureate program reminds us that culture and creativity are essential to freedom of expression, civil liberties and democracy,” writes Chicago Public Library’s Brown. “What I’ve seen, again and again, is how both of the laureates connect with Chicagoans through performance, teaching and conversation.”
Newly announced Poet Laureate Mayda del Valle at the Chicago Cultural Center, January 2026/Photo: Peyton Reich/Office of the Mayor
For Mayda and avery, having a foot in the civic door is one of the biggest boons the program offers, but it can’t stop there. “DCASE doesn’t have a lit person to give access to the literary people,” avery says. “That would be one of the biggest successes of the program.”
Poetry Foundation’s Noriega is proud of what’s become of the Chicago laureateship in such a short time: “They have built a program that can serve as a model nationally for other jurisdictions that want to include poetry in their civic life.” “Chicago’s acclaimed poetry scene deserves proper and consistent recognition,” Kenya Merrit writes, “and with that support, artists are afforded opportunities to thrive.”
I want to ask you if you ever wanted to leave.
If you can see yourself living somewhere other than here:
this city that put the wind in your lungs,
the ice in your stare.It’s not that I hated home—
it’s just that my sense of destiny made me look
beyond the invisible border.—Mayda del Valle, “This is How You Leave Home”
“Lineage is the word that keeps coming up for me in my practice,” Mayda says. “Everything has been done, but you add your own flavor.”
“In high school,” she continues, “I used to work at Ford City Mall at Underground Wheels, which was owned by Dug Infinite, who’s the person that taught Kanye how to make beats. The first book of poems I ever got was Sonia Sanchez, when I was like sixteen years old, from the Black-owned bookstore across the hall from the skate shop. What business did I have reading this book called
‘I’ve Been a Woman’?—I’m not even a woman yet,” she says with a glint in her eyes. “But then I go away to school in Massachusetts and somebody also gave me the anthology of poetry from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. I was obsessed.”
Mayda gets up and walks back to her shelves, hunting, as avery says, “Come on, library.” Mayda comes back pointing at a book’s cover. “Everyone thinks that’s me on the cover,” she says, laughing, “to this day.” Maybe it’s the clothes, which she said she still wears sometimes. “There’s something so public and embodied about the cover.”
In some ways, it sounds as if the cover poet might as well be Mayda. That poet represents a version of herself.
“I saw these elders perform and learned this is what poetry’s meant to be. Poetry is meant to be heard.” The passion comes through in her voice. “It’s meant to be embodied. It’s meant to be experienced in community, in song, with music, with dance, with all of these things.”
This poetry, the poetry Mayda and Avery grew up with in Chicago and bring to life as laureates today, isn’t “book” poetry. There may be books, but it isn’t that poetry. We’ve all been to the academy readings done in academy voice, we agree. Mayda straightens in her seat with a wiggle and looks at her open-book hands, performing with a stilted tone: “They all have the cadence
of the academic poet that goes
like this.
And they stay
on the same cadence
for the 18 poems
of their newly
published
book.”
We laugh. The poetry we speak of isn’t that. What I am hearing about is a poetry unbound by pages. This poetry beyond the book has to walk around with others. It breathes in experience and cries out life.