What does it mean to be a "government artist" in San Diego?
Outgoing Poet Laureate Jason Magabo Perez shares the lessons he's learned from his two-year term, where he brought the city's neighborhoods to life through his vivid poetry. As Paola Capó-García takes on the mantle, she talks about her plans to bring a fresh perspective to the role and expand poetry's reach.
"I think that poetry has a way of winning anyone over if you're showing them that a poem can look and feel and sound like anything, that there's humor in poetry, that decoding a poem can feel like a game that you do with friends. And how one line or one word can have infinite meanings," Capó-García said.
In this conversation, both poets dive into how they demystify poetry for students and the public, and how they can connect and uplift San Diego's diverse communities through verse.
Guests:
- Paola Capó-García, San Diego poet laureate (2025-27), Professional Learning Coordinator at High Tech High Graduate School of Education
- Jason Magabo Perez, San Diego poet laureate emeritus (2023-24), Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University San Marcos
- David Tomas Martinez, writer
David Tomas Martinez shares a poem from his second collection, "Post Traumatic Hood Disorder":
Poems read in this episode:
Yellow
Paola Capó-García
When I was young I thought the soul was a body part
To the right of my heart and in between the pre-breasts
this soul-thing would nest—and then one day it fell out?—
No It stuck around too long
and made a house of my insides The walls were
yellow which I now know is the color of hunger and
that's why I crave baby chicks and gold There
was so much furniture shoved inside of me and even if
the décor was mid-century, the style was mortal My
memory is hungry She wanted me to paint my face
every morning Makeup could enhance better
make use of this face But then my dog licked the second
face off clean That is my favorite movie
From "CLAP FOR ME THAT'S NOT ME" (Rescue Press, 2018)
Found Fragment on Ambition
David Tomas Martinez
v.
if a hood is a sense of place
& a sense of place is identity
then identity is a hood & adult
hood is being insecure in any
hood a hood scares the whitest
folks why folks scared to stop
in the hood & why folks stop
wearing a hood & call it white
nationalism if i tried i would
fail to pass if i failed i would
try to pass when can i retire my
bowl stop needing to beg for my
person hood you see academically
my ghetto pass was revoked please
sir can you direct me to the window
to turn in my man card where
can i apply to enter the whiteness
protection program ive lost
my found identity is a hood
a hood is a sense of place
a place places a hood hood in us
From "Post Traumatic Hood Disorder" (Sarabande Books, 2018).
We Draft Work Songs for the City
Jason Magabo Perez
Here is a parable,
a prayer, perhaps,
for those unmapped;
Here are new students
considering new lives,
new interrogations, new
footnotes, but no new
friendships, no news. None.
Still, the problem of loans.
Still, the problem of rent.
Still, the problem of property.
This alley off University is
a gallery of abandoned mattresses
Stacked against limp wire fencing that
leans against wood panels that
shade the driveway where the
unmapped fall asleep.
Ancestral spirits are
no less spectacle than
principled remembrance:
The craft of this tissue
we often call ourselves.
From "I ask about what falls away" (Kaya Press, 2024).
Mobility
Paola Capó-García
I keep finding people living in my house mouths I've never seen expressions through paint chips and light
fixtures I keep coming back to this place I label "house" because my plane tickets are designed to get me here and the bed has been made in the shape of an invitation
I learned to ride a bike on Wednesday and felt new I always resisted I didn't know how to balance on pavement or glitter I didn't know why that would be required of me this bike does not know the road to my house
Website says woman in tight dress slips on butter for twenty minutes, calls it art well what would you call that? an accident? It seems really lovely to me how the butter would go in and out of her pores as if it's always been trying to get back to that place
From "CLAP FOR ME THAT'S NOT ME" (Rescue Press, 2018).
Jason and Paola's literary influences:
- I Was Born With Two Tongues ("Pillars" plays in episode)
- Talib Kweli / Black Star ("Definition" plays in episode)
- Fredrico García Lorca
- Langston Hughes
Poems Paola often shares with her students:
- Lucille Clifton on the origins of poetry
- "A Small Needful Fact" by Ross Gay
- "Literature of Resistance Re-Imagined with Pepsi" by Tiffany Midge
Mentioned in this episode:
- San Diego Poetry Futures | Poetry initiative from Jason Magabo Perez that brings people together through workshops, collabs and community verse
- Love Hoops NYC | New York City-based basketball collective hosting open runs, skills sessions and events that build community on and off the court
- Ada Limón, United States poet laureate
- Lee Herrick, California poet laureate
Sources:
- City of San Diego Poet Laureate (City of San Diego, 2020-2025)
- Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowships (Academy of American Poets)
- Creating Poets Laureate Positions in States, Cities, U.S. Territories, and Tribal Nations (Academy of American Poets)
- San Diego Poet Laureate wraps up term by dreaming and planting seeds in new festival (KPBS, December 2024)
- "Here’s why Kendall Jenner's Pepsi ad is so controversial" (Washington Post, May 2017)
- Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Admin (The Art Story)
From KPBS Public Media, The Finest is a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts or click the play button at the top of this page and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts, Pandora, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Episode 3: Poets Laureate
Julia Dixon Evans: Did you know San Diego has a poet laureate? But what even is a poet laureate?
By our count, there are at least 60 cities and counties in California alone with an official municipal poet laureate. Here in San Diego, each laureate receives $20,000 from the city for a two-year term. They work with the local government to create meaningful art and organize community programs. It's a civic position — a government artist, if you will, which is a pretty funny concept.
Jason Magabo Perez: Government artist.
Paola Capó-García: I don't know how I feel about that.
Perez: Government-supported maybe. Yeah, it's a lot to navigate.
Evans: That is Jason Magabo Perez, who just wrapped up his two-year term as San Diego's poet laureate, and Paola Capó-García, who just began hers.
Capó-García: Poetry has a way of winning anyone over if you are showing them that a poem can look and feel and sound like anything, that there's humor in poetry, that decoding a poem can feel like a game that you do with friends.
Evans: Jason and Paola are both poets, of course, but also educators. Jason teaches at the university level, and Paola is a high school educator. They aim to demystify poetry, to knock it off its pedestal.
Perez: You're tasked with the responsibility of making poetry legible, not just like poems legible, but the idea of poetry legible.
Perez: We had both Jason and Paola in our studio for a poet laureate torch pass — a conversation about the job: what Jason learned and what Paola hopes to accomplish.
Jason is an obsessive observer of San Diego's many neighborhoods, and his poems bring them to life in a big way. And Paola uses colorful and surprising language to describe universal experiences. But don't take my word for it. Here's Paola reading one of her poems herself, in our studio.
Capó-García: This poem is called "Yellow."
When I was young, I thought the soul was a body part. To the right of my heart and in between the pre breasts, this soul thing would nest. And then one day it fell out? No, it stuck around too long, and made a house of my insides. The walls were yellow, which I now know is the color of hunger, and that's why I crave baby chicks and gold. There was so much furniture shoved inside of me, and even if the decor was mid century, the style was mortal. My memory is hungry. She wanted me to paint my face every morning. Makeup could enhance, better, make use of this face. But then my dog licked the second face off. Clean. That is my favorite movie.
Evans: From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.
[Theme Music]
Evans: K, Jason lets start with you, how did you find your way to poetry?
Perez: I had an aversion to English and literature classes. I was not a great English writing student. I have poor reading memory. I found poetry through, I kind of stumbled into it. I did my undergraduate studies at UCSD. But a lot of where I was finding poetry was through the student activist space and the community organizing space.
And so as we were trying to make sense of some of our political ideas and trying to make sense of what this meant for us as young people, poetry happened to be around. I gravitated immediately towards spoken word and hip-hop. And so when that clicked, I thought back to having grown up listening to hip-hop music and really paying attention to lyrics. I had a love for language, but I didn't know that I could call it poetry until a little bit into my undergrad career.
One of the artists or one of the groups that we were really, really listening to at this moment in the early 2000s, they called themselves a pan Asian spoken word hip-hop group and they were called, I Was Born With Two Tongues. And they were four members from different parts of the Asian American diaspora, but they clearly had been, had grown up listening to hip-hop but also had clearly grown up in an immigrant household. And it sounded like hip-hop. But then when you paid attention to the transcript or looked at the text, you could tell that there was a genealogy of literature behind it.
[Music: I Was Born With Two Tongues' "Pillars"]
Perez: So that relationship between language and music had always been there for me. And I'm not musical by any means, and so maybe that's where I gravitated towards the writing part.
Evans: Like I can do this part…
Perez: Right, right, right, right. I at least can do that. Yeah.
[Music: I Was Born With Two Tongues' "Pillars"]
Evans: And Paola, what about you? Is there a specific poet or poem that you can trace back to that really hit you when you were younger?
Capó-García: It's funny that you mentioned hip-hop because I remember when my sister was in college, I was in high school, she gave me the Talib Kweli album and Black Star and I got absolutely obsessed with it to really sort of think about the lyrics.
[Music: Black Star's "Definition"]
Capó-García: So that's something that hit me hard at that age and made me realize all these different possibilities and the musicality in writing that can exist on the page.
And I wrote my first poem — a really terrible poem, but it feels special nonetheless. We all have to write terrible things to get to better things. And I was obsessed. I just kept writing and writing and writing. I was exposed in high school to García Lorca's work and Langston Hughes' work as well. And the musicality in his work and also the way that he's wrestling with history actively in those poems, that was very moving to me.
I also wanted to express myself in English, because to me that felt like a different side of myself.
Evans: And you were living in Puerto Rico at the time?
Capó-García: Yes, I grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Spanish is my first language. English also always felt like my other first language because I grew up with a lot of TV. But it always felt like a language where I could access a lot of my creativity in because I watch so many films and so many TV shows and I listen to so much music and so much hip-hop and so much alternative rock. Now, of course, I'm trying to constantly get back to Spanish. And so there's — the grass is always greener. But I think that's why I incorporate so much Spanglish in my work now. But at the time, English felt like a really interesting, creative avenue.
Evans: Like a lot of young people, Paola fell in love with art — and poetry, specifically, but it's not like she imagined growing up to be a poet, like as a job. Her path took some turns.
Capó-García: And I came to the U.S. during undergrad. I went to Syracuse University for my four years of undergrad, and I studied journalism there but English and textual studies as well. I worked as a journalist in New York City for a couple years focused mainly on Latin entertainment, specifically music and film.
And it didn't feel right to me. It felt like something I liked, it didn't feel like something I loved, and that really, really pushed me. And that's when I decided to apply to MFA programs and MA programs. And so I went to UC Davis for two years and got my MA in English there, and also wrote a poetry manuscript there that is trash. We don't talk about that manuscript. What brought me to San Diego is an MFA program at UCSD. I was hopping around every two years it felt: from Puerto Rico to Syracuse to New York city to Davis to San Diego. And when I got here, it felt like, oh, I'm here. This is my other home other than San Juan. This feels like my other home.
Evans: OK, when someone says to you, I don't get poetry, how would you explain what a poem is to them? Because I think there are so many misconceptions where it's like, poetry has to rhyme or no, poetry does not have to rhyme; you can just press enter a whole bunch and then you have a poem. How would you talk about poetry? Go ahead. Who wants it first?
Perez: I could try. I could try. That came up quite a lot, especially in teaching. I think part of the job is not to move to the practice of putting a poem together first. There's something important in the invitation to engage in poetic thinking, I guess is a way to put it. So, sharpen our skills of witness and our skills of observation and describing things. Being someone who pays attention and attempts to put language to an experience or to a thought.
Capó-García: On my syllabus, I would always put this line by Lucille Clifton, where she said that the very first poem is when someone emerged from a cave and went into the savanna and just said, ah — that was the first poem. And breaking that down with students: What does that mean then to just say, ah, and have that be a poetic gesture?
I was met with a lot of that resistance on the first day of every semester with my high school students. To them, poetry equals cringe. Poetry equals too much vulnerability. Why does it need to be so complicated? It can feel pretentious to them. All of these general stereotypes around poetry. They want to understand, why do I need to do this? Why should I read this?
I would make a promise to them on the syllabus. I would say, by the end of the semester, you will either love, or at the very least, respect poetry. If you don't, I'll buy you a cookie. And then my big thing was, I gotta say, I've never bought a student a cookie. Because I think that poetry has a way of winning anyone over if you're showing them that a poem can look and feel and sound like anything, that there's humor in poetry, that decoding a poem can feel like a game that you do with friends. And how one line or one word can have infinite meanings depending on your posture, your positionality, your experiences. That's what I do. If someone is skeptical about it, then let's read together because we have to pursue a culture of reading to really thrive in a culture of writing. I don't want to just give people prompts. I want us to read and be in community together, problem solving this text.
Evans: Paola, especially at the high school level, are there particular poets that really resonate with this age group? Is there something that you know is going to be a hit?
Capó-García: I had my classics. I love reading Ross Gay's "A Small Needful Fact," which talks about Eric Garner, but it's a poem that also prioritizes the beauty of Eric Garner and not the horrific way in which he was killed. And to me that's a great conversation with students about how we honor people.
And I always end on a hilarious and super powerful poem by Tiffany Midge, called "Literature of Resistance Re-Imagined with Pepsi." It is an incredible poem where she takes books written by Indigenous authors, and she replaces keywords in the title of the books with the word Pepsi.
And this was a writing experiment that she did after the really famous Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad where she gives a Pepsi can to a police officer and solves racism.
Evans: Right.
[Sound clip: Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner]
Capó-García: She wrote this poem in response to that, but it is also a poem that, through this silly maneuver, gets students thinking about colonialism, gets students thinking about the genocide of Indigenous people in the Americas.
We were talking about David Tomas Martinez the other day, a hometown hero, a San Diego poet. He has this incredible poem called "Found Fragment on Ambition" and it is a super complex tongue twister of a poem and students would have so much fun decoding it, but also they were incredibly moved by the end.
Evans: OK, so it's worth interrupting Paola here, so that you can hear this one for yourself.
Here is San Diego's own David Tomas Martinez. He read this poem for us at Love Hoops NYC, a basketball community in New York, where he lives now. The people there, he told us, are a representative sample of the audience for this poem.
David Tomas Martinez: What's up? I'm David Tomas Martinez, Southeast San Diego, live from Brooklyn, and today I'm going to read "Found Fragment on Ambition." Five…
If a hood is a sense of place and a sense of place is identity, then identity is a hood and adulthood is being insecure in any hood. A hood scares the whitest folks. Why folks scared to stop in the hood and why folks stop wearing a hood and call it white nationalism. If I tried, I would fail to pass. If I failed, I would try to pass. When can I retire my bowl? Stop needing to beg for my person hood. You see academically my ghetto pass was revoked. Please sir, can you direct me to the window to turn in my man card? Where can I apply to enter the whiteness protection program. I've lost my found. Identity is a hood. A hood is a sense of place. A place places a hood hood in us.
Capó-García: For some students, it's maybe the first poem they saw themselves in, their own experiences, or their family's experiences. But being able to analyze, OK, why is this poem written completely in lowercase? Why are there, why is there no punctuation? Why this? Why that? It has all these decisions that are really rich to get students thinking about why writers make certain decisions.
Perez: Does this not make you want to be in Paolo's class?
Evans: Absolutely. I'm like, where's my notebook? I need to be taking notes.
Perez: It's like, when's the first workshop? I'll be there.
Capó-García: OK I, and maybe you relate to this, but I think one of the most beautiful and fulfilling experiences is to have a student you've had in a class, either during spring break, during the summer, a year later, email you saying, oh, hey, I just wrote these poems the other day. That feels like a really beautiful thing, and that you can still be in community with these young people later on in their lives and see how poetry can be an effective tool for them.
Perez: Especially in ways that you don't expect. Sometimes they're not trying to be writers either or as a career, or even sustain a consistent writing practice, but like, hey, I needed to write these things and I just wanted to share them with you. Yeah. That means the world.
Capó-García: And also, it has opened me up to being able to help someone who uses poetry as a cry for help. I've had students who have confessed things in poetry that required immediate attention and required intervention, and they couldn't say it out loud, they couldn't go to someone, but they could write in a poem. I think that's the best thing that a poem can give you is the ability to act on something.
[Theme Music]
Evans: When I think of government artists, two very different images come to mind: One is like a royal minstrel performing for the king and his court. And the other is the Great Depression-era Works Progress Administration, or WPA. It's one of the most significant federal art programs in United States history.
The more I learned from Jason and Paola, I realize their role isn't far from either. They're launching new programs and hosting events — doing tangible community service. And they bring joy and introduce people to new ways of using language, and this helps those people understand and express themselves.
Yes, there are public art projects, federal and state arts grants, but the role of a poet laureate stands apart. Very few professions even have laureates. At the federal level, Ada Limón is currently finishing up her term as the 24th United States poet laureate. There's also a California poet laureate, Lee Herrick. These laureate positions are growing in popularity all over the country.
Jason was just the second poet laureate in San Diego. On top of the $20,000 he got from the city, he applied for and received an additional $50,000 grant from the Academy of American Poets. Paola plans on applying for that extra funding as well.
Since the academy started that fellowship program six years ago, only about 20 poets a year receive the funding — a fraction of the eligible poets laureate across the U.S.
And while Jason maintained his teaching job for most of his term, he was able to take a sabbatical to focus on his writing and laureate duties. During his tenure, Jason launched San Diego Poetry Futures, a project that included workshops, film screenings, seminars, teacher training and even a poetry festival.
Perez: In my experiences as laureate in the last two years, what was tricky was not only that poetry was difficult to translate for communities who didn't always have a relationship with poetry, but the challenge also was that it was an official government-linked position.
You can't easily bring in that kind of title to many of our communities. There's a lot of trust building that needs to happen. And I think where it gets overwhelming, in a good way, I think, is that there's a need for poetry in the city and it's not that that need isn't being met.
But I didn't expect certain organizations or certain collaborators to approach me because I don't know that they always had this thing called poetry as a part of their mission or a part of what they wanted to do but because it was I happened to be put in a space where they were, they saw that it it could make sense — this thing called literature. It shows me that the community is hungry for this kind of position, for someone to advocate for their stories, for someone to advocate for their language practices.
Capó-García: I am very lucky to have a great model for what it is to be a poet laureate next to me in my corner helping me through this, because it is an overwhelming thing. It's an overwhelming title and the prospect of everything feels wild and exciting. But what I'm excited about is to have the space, perhaps the funds, the means, the time — use all this government backing for good. To build bridges between organizations that maybe don't always have the best funding or maybe would love to be able to do more collaborative projects with other organizations and just don't have the means to do it. So to sort of bring light to those organizations and to show that poetry is this living, breathing thing that we can play with.
I've been with High Tech High for so many years and been doing this work with High Tech High, but I want to do it with a lot of other schools. I want to go beyond this school and really be able to go into different schools and not just work with students, but work with English and humanities teachers. Because what I find is that so many teachers shy away from teaching poetry because they say, well, I don't read it very much, or I've never written it, or it feels maybe too complicated, or it just doesn't go with what I do. And I think that that is such a missed opportunity.
I think we need more events. I think San Diego doesn't always get seen as this cultural city, which to me is a huge misconception. There's so much incredible stuff happening in this city, in extremely underfunded and invisible ways sometimes, but it's happening. I want to bring that more to the surface so that people know, hey, this event is happening and this is happening, and every weekend and every week feels like there's a new art event that we can go to and that we can connect with others.
That is my hope and that poetry is seen as an art form. It's not just writing, it's an art. And how could we incorporate that into more circles and normalize it and remove it from this pretentious misconception that it has?
Evans: And being a city's poet laureate intrinsically connects your work with that place. Can you talk about what San Diego means to your work?
Perez: My second book that came out last year, during the second year of my term, is about and for — and is thoroughly about — San Diego. I grew up in Oceanside, but I've spent most of my life in San Diego, and in different neighborhoods in the city. Just bearing witness to those different corners and the various kinds of living that happens on a daily basis throughout the city, is inspiring.
But being a poet laureate, part of the responsibility is to put on for your city. Is to represent the city. And tell folks why we love this city, and defend the city when it needs defending and celebrate the city, every corner of it.
When I wrote what some poetry friends have called my hit single about the city and I referenced so much of the vast city, I had to remind myself that I was writing to the people that I saw in the poem. I was writing to the community of Somali uncles outside of the Somali restaurant in City Heights, and that there was going to be a place in literature for them. I was talking to a barber out in Mira Mesa, and he grew up in Mira Mesa, and I wrote this long poem about Mira Mesa. and I told the barber — he's half my age — I said, a part of my writing career I decided I was going to make Mira Mesa a part of literature. And he was, like, that's tough. I said, it is. It is tough. That's tough. In my way and your way that you're using the word tough.
Evans: "I ask about what falls away" is Jason's book-length poem. It explores San Diego's endlessly lively neighborhoods and nooks and crannies. He read an excerpt for me around the time it came out.
Perez: Here is a parable, a prayer perhaps, for those unmapped. Here are new students, considering new lives, new interrogations, new footnotes, but no new friendships, no news, none. Still, the problem of rent. Still, the problem of loans. Still, the problem of property. This alley off University is a gallery of abandoned mattresses stacked against limp wire fencing that leans against wood panels that shade the driveway where the unmapped fall asleep. Ancestral spirits are no less spectacle than principled remembrance. The craft of this tissue we often call ourselves.
Evans: From my vantage point, Jason's tenure as poet laureate was a huge success, and a prime example of why the position exists. He immortalized San Diego's overlooked back alleys in an epic poem. He really did make Mira Mesa a part of literature. And he introduced poetry to people that had never imagined it could be a real part of their lives. He made poetry belong to more people.
Paola will bring her own energy and plans to the role, but with every bit as much a sense of purpose and care. When she got the call that she was selected as the city of San Diego's next poet laureate, it was at a point of deep vulnerability for Paola, but also a moment of clarity for how her entire life had led to being a poet.
Capó-García: I found out the same week that I found out my grandmother passed away. That still feels very fresh. It felt like fate in a weird way. My grandmother is someone who, everyone in the family, we think of her as our good luck charm. And so, it felt like a really beautiful connection. It made it hard to process and celebrate it in the moment, but it felt very beautiful.
Evans: Is there something that you might take from your grandmother and bring it to this role?
Capó-García: Let's see, what can I take from Mamima? I think unconditional love. That feeling of home, and how can I bring that wherever I go? And how can I make poetry feel like that for some people? I think that unconditional love and that joy, that playfulness that my grandmother with us as a grandmother always had, and always this attention to how she can make something feel warmer and more inviting for us. That feels important to me, personally and professionally.
Evans: That's really beautiful.
Capó-García: I'm gonna read a poem called "Mobility" from my book "CLAP FOR ME THAT'S NOT ME."
"Mobility." I keep finding people living in my house. Mouths I've never seen. Expressions through paint chips and light fixtures. I keep coming back to this place I label house. Because my plane tickets are designed to get me here, and the bed has been made in the shape of an invitation. I learned to ride a bike on Wednesday and felt new. I always resisted. I didn't know how to balance on pavement or glitter. I didn't know why that would be required of me. This bike does not know the road to my house. Website says, woman in tight dress slips on butter for 20 minutes, calls it art. Well, what would you call that? An accident? It seems really lovely to me, how the butter would go in and out of her pores, as if it's always been trying to get back to that place.
Evans: Jason, talk about that.
Perez: What I noticed, and this may be what I noticed as we were sort of reading, as I first encountered Paola's work, is that unexpected juxtaposition of these phrases of like, this morning I learned how to ride a bike and felt new. I mean, it's brilliant because it helps us understand what it means to piece together a home and why that is always such a really fascinating thing to meditate on. The brilliance in the poem is there's this very, very, very conversational tone, and there we're describing this thing, but then those juxtapositions are like, oh. Oh, OK, we're going to go there. Oh, we're going to talk about this piece of art that has been misread. And so what does that mean about how we misread everyday experience or misread the home as this art of juxtapositions, especially for an immigrant. Especially in a place like San Diego.
Evans: Do you have any response to that?
Capó-García: Other than crying? I'm an emotional person. It feels so lovely. Not just to be seen as a human, but for your work, to be understood so quickly. The breakdown that you just had of that poem, in real time, it felt very magical to hear that back because I'm so used to looking at other people's work that I have sort of forgotten what it is to be read. And what it is to be understood in that way. And it just means a lot to have your support in all of this, and your partnership in this. So thank you so much.
Evans: Well, thank you both so much.
Capó-García: Thank you.
Perez: Thank you.
Evans: All right, I need a snack..
Perez: That was an epic conversation.
Evans: Yeah. Wow.
A special thanks to Paola Capó-García, Jason Magabo Perez and David Tomas Martinez for their help with this episode.
And by the way, if you wish you were writing down a list of all these poetry recommendations, we've made one for you, and you can find it in the show notes or at KPBS dot org slash The Finest.
Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe, leave a rating and share it with your friends.
We're off next week, but in two weeks on The Finest, we're returning to music and the music economy. Spotify is changing, so we talk to one local indie artist who's advocating for fairness in a stream-heavy world.
Julianna Zachariou: Yeah, I mean we need laws, baby. We need big guns. We need something that we can point to and be like, this is illegal. What you're doing is illegal.
Evans: The Finest is a production of KPBS Public Media. I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer is Anthony Wallace who also composed the score. Our audio engineer is Ben Redlawsk, and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.