Brian Sonia-Wallace believes poetry and the creative arts should be an interwoven part of society – that public displays of wordplay should be commonplace.

To follow through on that ethos, he has spent the last 15 years lugging a Remington typewriter around the city offering poems to random passersby. He also has advised the next generation of wordsmiths as an instructor at UCLA Extension. And now, he will have his largest platform yet: Los Angeles Poet Laureate.

“In a way, accepting this honor is a little like receiving rocket fuel for the stuff that I’ve always been doing,” he said. “But it also gives me the opportunity to dream bigger and take on projects that were maybe only a curiosity before, and get real momentum behind them.”

The City of Los Angeles Poet Laureate program began in 2012 as a collaboration between the Los Angeles Public Library and the Department of Cultural Affairs. Sonia-Wallace was selected for a one-year term through a citywide process. He has been awarded a $10,000 grant, and in return, at a minimum, he will conduct six public readings and six public workshops. Past winners include Eloise Klein Healy, Luis J. Rodriguez, Robin Coste Lewis and Lynne Thompson.

“There is so much potential for us to have these sorts of creative infrastructure conversations,” Sonia-Wallace said. “More than anything else, that’s what I would like to focus on. I want to work with Metro, the airport, the zoo, with the police department – who needs a poet but doesn’t know it yet?”

What does that mean exactly? Sonia-Wallace said he would love to see more input from creative artists across city departments. But also, he pitched fun projects like poetry passages splashed across Metro trains or kiosks at the airport that spit out a souvenir poem. Inclusivity will be a point of emphasis.

“What’s the work that can happen in the literary space to help uplift voices and create positive narratives, while also supporting communities speaking for themselves?” he said.

“Poetry belongs to every Angeleno, and Brian Sonia-Wallace has a remarkable gift for bringing people together through its power,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement. “I am proud to name him our next poet laureate and look forward to the inspiration and connection he will foster across the many communities that make up our great city.”

Growing up, Sonia-Wallace took remedial reading classes and was slow to start writing. His mother had him type a page a day on the computer to improve his typing skills – an arduous task for a young boy.

“I discovered pretty quickly that you can type a page of poems faster than a page of prose because of the line breaks,” he recalled with a chuckle. “I became a poet as kind of a cheat code. To finish the work faster. But it also kind of stuck.”

He went to college for sustainable development, not poetry. But he was active in the poetry community by hosting open mics, attending writers conferences and participating in writers workshops.

“When I started doing it professionally, it was kind of on a dare,” he said.

After being laid off and having his contract work reduced to a trickle, Sonia-Wallace challenged himself to take his hobby – writing poems live on the streets of Los Angeles for tips – and see if he could actually support himself fulltime. Sometimes he made $150 and sometimes he came home with only $7, but pretty soon, word got around about the guy with the Remington typewriter who was at the local farmers market or spotted on the Venice boardwalk.

“And then it kind of didn’t stop,” he said. “I started working weddings and corporate parties. It became the base of a business.”

Sonia-Wallace was hired by the Mall of America in Minnesota. His exploits garnered the attention of publisher Harper Collins and landed him a book deal. By then, he had caught the attention of UCLA Extension, and he was hired during the pandemic.

“That time allowed for a return to creative writing for a lot of folks – they were finally able to make time for it. It was kind of this beautiful thing,” he said, adding he has loved his time as an instructor. “I feel like the people who take Extension classes are smart, curious professionals who want to be there. They are really committed to this craft. Creative writing is always the kind of thing we’ll say we’ll get around to. But these are the people who say, ‘No, now’s the time.’”

Sonia-Wallace has taught creative, poetry and personal essay writing courses for UCLA Extension. This fall, he will lead Poetry Toolbox, which he said will act as a broad primer to the artform.

“I think poetry is the base of everything,” he said. “Before we siloed all these types of creativity, the Greeks just said you were a poet – even for music and theater. The poet was the artist. There is something fundamental to the art of being human in that. Self-expression is a fundamental part of what it means to be human, and poetry is the thing everyone has access to first.”