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.