Students from the Spoken Arts program at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts will open for 2023 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Nairobi Barnes as our featured reader.

As a woman who leads with her heart, Barnes says, her words have never steered her wrong and with every new journey she embarks on, a poem follows. She has written press releases about voting rights, discrimination against Black women, and Black hair and how it defines her culture.

The Oakland Youth Poet Laureate program is a citywide effort to celebrate literacy through poetry. Each year they accept applications from talented Oakland writers (ages 13-18) to join a community of young poets. Spoken Artists at Ruth Asawa explore their creative voice(s) through poetry, dramatic and comedic performance, improvisation, rap and public speaking.