Meet the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Judges
We are very grateful to all our judges for their time and their dedication to Oakland youth.
Each year five judges work together to select the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate.
Our judges represent a diverse group of experts from literacy, arts, and educational organizations as well as local celebrity authors, artists, and activists.
Past judges have included U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, poets and playwrights Chinaka Hodge and Aimee Suzara, community organizer and Poetry for the People alum Maria Poblet, literary journal editor Kiala Givehand, NAACP image award nominee Arisa White, KQED Columnist Pendarvis Harshaw, award-winning writer MK Chavez, former Oakland City Councilmember Wilson Riles, Hip Hop for Change Founder and Executive Director Khafre Jay, author, musician, educator, and community organizer Tyson Amir, former Oakland Youth Poets Laureate and Finalists, as well as many other local authors and community leaders.
Meet the 2026 OYPL Judges
Alex Feliciano Mejía
Alex Feliciano Mejía is an educator, writer, and filmmaker exploring archives, displacement, and cultural memory.
From digitizing historical footage in Guatemala to rendering transnational experiences in the Bay Area, Alex works across nonfiction literature and experimental cinema. His practice bridges hand-processed film techniques, critical pedagogy, and experimental writing to examine colonial histories and diasporic identity.
Alex teaches media arts and multilingual pedagogy at San Francisco State University, where he's completing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction.
Ha Kiet Chau
Ha Kiet Chau is a Chinese-Vietnamese American writer from Oakland, California and the author of the poetry collection, Eleven Miles to June (Green Writers Press, 2021).
She received an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and served as the co-poetry editor of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review. A recipient of the 2014-2015 UCLA Extension Writers’ Program Scholarship and the 2023-2024 Bernice Ruben Arnold Award, her work has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New American Writing, Ploughshares, NELLE, South Carolina Review, and The Margins.
Ha currently teaches art and literature in the SF Bay Area and helps youth organizations promote reading and language arts. Her YA novel in verse, Darling Winter, is forthcoming from Mouthfeel Press.
James Cagney
Cave Canem fellow James Cagney is the award winning author of Black Steel Magnolias In The Hour Of Chaos Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), MARTIAN: The Saint Of Loneliness (Nomadic Press, 2022). His current collection, Ghetto Koans: A Personal Archive, is published by Black Lawrence Press.
He was born, raised, and currently resides in Oakland, Ca. Visit his website at JamesCagneyPoet.com.
Nadia Elgbal
Nadia Elbgal is the 2022 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate.
She is a Yemeni-American Muslim woman who advocates for and raises awareness on topics relating to the Middle Eastern and Muslim communities. As an artist-activist, Nadia’s themes range from the Middle East to American cities: the perspectives, experiences, and effects on people from both sides.
Nadia has been a literacy mentor to Yemeni students in OUSD elementary schools as well as a teaching assistant in a mental health class at Hoover Elementary’s summer program. She is an older sister and cousin whose values and insight come from her upbringing in mixed cultures and families.
As a storyteller, she identifies as an actor, playwright, lyricist, and poet.
Stefani Echeverría-Fenn
Stefani Echeverría-Fenn (she or they) is a poet, teacher, mother, and housing justice insurrectionary.
Her literary work has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Sinister Wisdom, The Town: An Anthology of Oakland Poets, Sententiae Antiquae, and performed as part of the National Queer Arts Festival. She is a 2024 Mellon Mays/Haymarket Books Writing Freedom Fellow, and a 2023 Lambda Literary Emerging Voices Fellow. Stefani is also the co-founder of the unhoused land/tiny home project 37MLK and the mutual aid collective The Sportula: Microgrants for Classics Students. She works for West Oakland’s Homeless Action Center.
The core of all of Stefani’s life work is an effort to build intergenerational lineages of queer familismo and communal care that transcend the nuclear family and bio-reproductive kinship bonds. This work is grounded in her lived experiences as a poor, psychiatrically disabled, Irish-Latina dyke and the power of others’ art and stories that have sustained her this far, including but not limited to the work of Flavia Rando, Claudia Rankine, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha, Hana Malia, Dorothy Allison, Carmen Maria Machado, and David Wojnarowicz.