Brian Sonia-Wallace: Los Angeles Poet Laureate
Brian Sonia-Wallace is a Los Angeles–based poet, educator, and public artist whose work lives at the intersection of poetry, civic space, and queer community care. His path to poetry began unexpectedly. As a child, he used drawing to connect with others. Reading and writing came later, and not easily. Because he was placed in remedial reading and struggled with typing, his mom made him type a page a day at age ten. He quickly realized poetry, with its line breaks, moved much faster. So he began writing a poem every day for years. The practice stuck.
In young adulthood, after being laid off from a job, Brian took a 1960 Smith Corona typewriter onto the streets of Los Angeles and began composing poems on the spot for passersby, attempting to pay his rent through poetry. This experiment became the origin of RENT Poet, a project grounded in the belief that poetry can be immediate, personal, and accessible. Influenced by his organizing work around street vending, he developed a model of creative exchange that meets people where they are—in parks, transit hubs, and public gatherings—transforming poetry into a shared, real-time experience.
What began as a solo endeavor has grown into a collaborative enterprise. RENT Poet now brings teams of poets to weddings, corporate events, and Pride celebrations, creating one-on-one typewriter poems for thousands each year while generating paid opportunities for artists. The project reflects Brian’s guiding belief that “everyone deserves a poem.”
Brian is the author of The Poetry of Strangers (HarperCollins, 2020) and Maze Mouth (Moon Tide Press, 2023), and his writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and Lit Hub. A former Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, he has completed residencies with organizations including Amtrak and the Mall of America. He teaches through the UCLA Extension Writers Program and holds an M.A. in arts for activism from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Brian grew up bilingual in Culver City and Santiago, Chile, and works in English and Spanish.
In 2021, he received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, supporting his efforts to expand poetry access through innovative, community-centered programming. Across his work, he remains committed to honoring individual stories and reimagining poetry as a living, participatory art form.
A Century of Light
Brian Sonia-Wallace
For the Centennial of the Los Angeles Central Library, July 11, 2026
100 years ago, a choir of orange groves
fragranted the air with sour music
where missionaries had preached hellfire
& the steelhead swam past ti’at canoes
& humpback song, upstream
into the waiting mouths of grizzlies.
1926 — the red car trolley connected
mountain & beachhead, men in wool suits
& fedoras promenaded Spring Street,
dug black gold from soil
redolent with mammoth bones
& feared the LA River, its wild flood of willow
& cottonwood.
Into this land came: a librarian
unquenchable as desert,nomad
pooling books between the houses of the wealthy.
As a city grew from 5,000 toward 4 million,
Everett Perry warned,
no metropolis can be home
which has no home for knowledge. & so
on the site of the State Normal School
a new Byzantine temple was born, an oasis
of dusty pages in burgeoning screen land —
a pyramid to life! With the golden torch
of knowledge at its peak.
We know what it means to be a catalogue of flames.
The 1986 arson, this ground’s latest entry in our
calamitous birthright. Since before Alexandria, libraries
have burned. We build our civilization on what survives
the fire, lose generations & keep trekking still uphill
The sphinx’s smile is an enigma. Before
a child learns meaning, they must first
sound out the words. Before the immigration
test, a father sits quiet hours in love’s austere
& lonely offices, shaping new dreams to speak
into a heartbreak country until
the thing with feathers tires of its circling
flight & lands, at last, in his upraised palm —
En el silencio de paginas, un hogar.
En la sabiduría sin letra de las abuelas, un hogar.
Los mundos fantásticos de Márquez, hogar.
La lucha, hogar.
La luna creciente, embarazada con luz, hogar.
Levanta tu mirada, viajero,
la antorcha sigue iluminando, resplandeciente
& when we ran out of space for all this language
Instead of building up, here, we dug down
In Octavia’s lab we learn that magic
is history that hasn’t happened yet —
All that you touch you change
All that you change changes you —
Our memories are seeds & in California, we know, some plants
need to feel the heat of a blaze
before they’ll grow, so we set imagination
against dystopia, our legacy a light
to beat back the oil slick dark.
In 2026, this is the final thing that is not for sale.
It’s America. Surely, no one reads anymore.
But dig down. There is a country under this country
that has been burnt, but is still growing,
a common good we are bold enough to believe in
through the ash cloud of history. Octavia
was on the bus, watched plumes of smoke rise
to devour her writing desk & still
prophesied a life for herself endless enough for us all —
our crescent eyes, like new moons, lift
to see that torch still singing out, Los Angeles!
Each year another burnt orange symphony,
call us science fiction, we know
what we are building toward:
another century of light.
