Funding for local poet laureate inspires international collaboration

At food establishments across Redmond, diners this month will find a unique accompaniment to their orders: poems.

Penned by local writers as well as international poets, the poems expound on community, harvest and lineage. Redmond’s poet laureate, Ching-In Chen, is leading the project, called Read Local Eat Local.  It kicks off on Thursday in conjunction with the Downtown Redmond Art Walk. 

After a call for poems, Chen and two other poets selected which pieces would be included. The poems will be shared at eight participating food establishments. 

“Reading poems about different kinds of experiences with food, with family and lineage, I feel like it’s helping me also get a better sense and understanding of the Redmond community,” Chen said. 

Chen’s initial project focused on local poets. But funding from the Academy of American Poets made it possible to include poems from Nanjing in China and Slemani in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Both are Cities of Literature, a UNESCO program that was created in 2004 and is made up 350 international cities.

“I’d be excited to also see if there are other cities we could collaborate with in the future,” Chen said. 

One of the roles of a poet laureate is to amplify and spotlight voices, Chen said. They’re excited to promote how poetry can do that. It’s something Chen did before and will continue after their term as poet laureate. But, they said, part of what makes these initiatives possible is the funding. 

“I’m always organizing gatherings and opportunities and ways for folks to connect, so I’m sure I’ll continue to do that,” Chen said. “I think that some of these projects wouldn’t have happened without that financial support, which is really important.”

Ricardo Maldonado, the president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets said the funding is intended to support poets in creating their own work, as well as the community work they engage in.

“Many of the poets we fund through this program have been doing community work for years,” Maldonado said. 

For 2024-25, the organization awarded $1.1 million to 22 poet laureate fellows to lead public poetry programs in their respective communities. This included the $50,000 fellowship to Chen. 

The money can be transformational in establishing programming for underserved communities, Maldonado said. 

“Many of these community members never had the opportunity to see themselves in poetry,” Maldonado said. “It’s a tool for seeing yourself in the world, in family, in your community, in your state.”

Another initiative the funding will help establish next year, Chen said, is the creation of a youth gathering of trans, nonbinary, intersex, and gender expansive poets.

“This is something that as a young nonbinary poet,  I wasn’t really introduced to any voices from those communities,” Chen said, “and that’s something that I want to change.”