Sacramento teen Alexandra Huynh named National Youth Poet Laureate

Alexandra Huynh, an 18-year old poet from Sacramento, was named the new National Youth Poet Laureate on Thursday.

The poetry of Huynh, a Mira Loma High School graduate and Sacramento native whose passions include youth empowerment, climate action and creative writing, was described by officials as “a tool of self-reclamation and social justice for marginalized communities.”

Since Thursday’s announcement, Huynh said she’s been “swimming in a pool of gratitude” from the outpouring of support from friends, family and community members. In an interview Friday afternoon, she said she hopes her writing will inspire others to look to poetry as a way to “process emotions and create change in communities.”

Huynh, who is a second generation Vietnamese American, previously told The Sacramento Bee that poetry was a means empowering her to take ownership of her cultural identity, beating back the normative narratives around the South East Asian community.

“It does feel a lot of the times that to be a Vietnamese American is to live a contradictory truth,” Huynh said Friday. “And what I mean by that is that I am constantly balancing two identities, and they can exist in parallel.”

The former Western Regional Ambassador and Sacramento Youth Poet Co-Laureate said poetry provides “a really wonderful space to try to explore” questions of identity and belonging.

“You can warp time, and you can build in silence, and not feel like you always have to be saying something as coherently as you would if you were to write it in essay form, for example,” she added. “That’s what allows us to paint ourselves as human on a page, as opposed to something that is supposed to be digestible product.”

Her senior year was cut short because of the pandemic, and has since taken a gap year that has allowed her to reflect on herself, and reignite her love for poetry again.

“What makes me happy? What’s enough for me? What do I want out of this lifetime? The pandemic provided me with a lot of reflection space to get some clarity on those questions,” she said. “But I think, importantly, for my poetry journey, it gave me so much reading time. ... I realized that I cannot write from an empty well.”

Poems she wrote last summer wove together feelings of loneliness and grief stemming raging wildfires in California, deadly floods in Vietnam, and a devastating global pandemic. In one poem, titled “It Does Not Matter Any Longer Where You Live” and performed Thursday, Huynh wrote:

they say it sounds like a bomb

when the mountain

that is not actually a mountain

explodes

& it weeps burials

for the willowed bodies

who watch water rise

to fool their conscience

“It just struck me as so tragic that we were having these tremendously devastating natural disasters happening on other opposite sides of the world, but they’re being caused by fundamentally the same thing — climate change,” she said. “We are not paying attention to the ways in which our planet is asking for help.”

Huynh, an alum of the Sacramento Area Youth Speaks, is the fifth National Youth Poet Laureate, which is presented by New York-based youth literary arts and youth development organization Urban Word.

The position gained national attention after Amanda Gorman, the first National Youth Poet Laureate, stunned the country with her deeply affecting performance at the presidential inauguration this year. (Gorman’s grandmother, Bertha Gorman, is a Sacramento resident and former Bee reporter.)

As Poet Laureate, Huynh will participate in a number of performances through May 2022, but she said she’s most excited about getting into school classrooms and connecting with students about the joys of poetry.

Huynh is heading to Stanford University this fall, and will focus her studies on civil or chemical engineering. She said she knows that may seem unconventional, given her poetry work, but she said she wants to “push myself to problem solve and think in a way I’ve never had to before.”

“I think it’s fascinating how the environment that we build can really shape the lives that we lead,” she said. “And I want to take part in building a world, a physical world, that creates more connection, and that is more equitable and sustainable.”

The full National Youth Poet Laureate ceremony, including all the poems read by finalists, can be viewed here.