Filipino American teen activist named Philly’s new youth poet laureate

PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Many artists discover their craft through adversity. For Malaya Ulan , it was feeling bullied by other students in her elementary school.

“Poetry became kind of a safe space for me to articulate how I felt, to share why this was impacting and as a form of therapy, basically,” she recalls. “I realized, I really love this form and that it’s really something important to me.”

Now Ulan has been selected as Philadelphia’s youth poet laureate for 2024-25.

Ulan is 16, a junior at Science Leadership Academy at Beeber, already a veteran of poetry slams, not to mention dance performances and filmmaking contests. Slim and unusually poised, Ulan wore a terno, a delicate blouse with large puffy sleeves, to the announcement of her selection at the Free Library’s central branch on Tuesday, an homage to her Filipino heritage.

“Sometimes I write about trying to connect back to my motherland, sometimes I write about gun violence in Philadelphia,” she said. “Poetry for me is really more of a portal for activism so whatever topic I feel needs to be spoken on, I write about that in that moment.”

The youth poet laureate program began in 2013 as a companion to the adult poet laureate program. Ulan will be working with the city’s adult poet laureate, Kai Davis, to bring poetry to a wider audience in Philadelphia.

“The selection committee… picked a person who is fiercely dedicated to justice but who is also tender, empathetic and compassionate,” said Davis of Ulan. She also praised Ulan’s poetry, a sample of which Ulan read at the announcement:

Green grass parts as I run through the fields.

It’s serene

And yet I look up to the sky, a dark shade of disdain

I can hear distant sounds of war

Screeching, wailing

I look down toward the forgiving earth.

Soil crusts between my calloused feet

I spread my toes sinking into the groun reaching out for Mother Earth’s bearings

A sweet potato. A camote.

A vegetable whose roots extend across diasporas

buried beneath layers of dead matter

She sits. Trapped.

Deep within the soil, her stems extending up to the sky,

Crawling across the ground like a war cry

For even beneath the surface of the earth she can still feel

Our suffering.

Her blooming flowers attempt to mask her weeping

When she realizes it’s okay to cry, to grieve her losses

to paint her tears no matter how ugly a color, it’s okay.

Held by the light that stirs in the soil,

she finds moments of rest so she can rise from the ground and finally give again.

So I can finally give again.