Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) and Youth Speaks are teaming up to highlight some of the Bay Area’s most talented youth poets! This year’s Community Voices: Poets Speak series is all about youth voices.  

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This five-week series joins poets and the visual arts for a captivating experience! Eight Bay Area youth poets will share new poems created in response to MoAD’s current exhibition, The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion. Join us in the MoAD galleries to experience creativity at the intersection of visual art and poetry.

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Every Thursday at 5pm from January 12-February 9th the poets will perform original work leading up to the group reading and celebration on Thursday February 9th at 6pm.

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Featured Poets

Christell Victoria Roach is an Emmy-nominated poet and performer from Miami, Florida. She is currently a 2022-2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University for poetry. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Miami after graduating from Emory University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Creative Writing & African American Studies. She writes the Blues of the Southern Tropics. Her recent work has been published by the Academy of American Poets,  POETRY Magazine, Obsidian Literary Journal , Scalawag Magazine, The Miami Rail, and SWIMM Magazine. She is currently working on her first book of poetry entitled, “Bluesing.

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Niambi Walker is a black, queer writer from Atlanta, Georgia. They identify as a person who “sometimes can put words together well enough to win slams, write books and just generally talk their shit”. They double as the menace dancing by themselves at the club yelling “Get into iiiit” and the author of “Accidentally Ordered an Espresso”.

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