Daniel Umemezie is only beginning his undergraduate education at Iowa State University, where he plans to study aerospace engineering, but he takes with him a wealth of experience as a prominent literary citizen. He completed his high school education in Cedar Falls, Iowa, serving as the state’s 2025–2026 Student Poet Ambassador, and was recently named the tenth National Youth Poet Laureate by the nonprofit organization Urban Word. He recently spoke about the impact of poetry on his formative years, art as a door to empathy, and the value of cultivating a creative life.
At such a young age you have already deeply engaged with the literary landscape as a performer, writing workshop instructor, and published poet. How do you balance the publishing industry’s expectations with those of your writing, personal life, and education?
One thing I’ve learned is that poetry itself and the experiences of life can’t really be separated. When I was younger I thought of writing as something that happened after experience, but now I understand that the poems are often formed while I’m living through things. School, family, leadership work, community organizing, being a son, being a student, being Nigerian, being American—all those things feed my work at the same time.
There are expectations that come with visibility, but I’ve tried to stay grounded in the understanding that the work must come before the recognition. The poems don’t care about titles. Every time I sit down to write, I’m back at the same place: facing a blank page and trying to discover something I didn’t know before.
Can you give us a sense of your journey into poetry and spoken word?
Poetry entered my life through language before it entered through literature. I grew up moving between worlds—between Nigeria and the United States, which had different ways of speaking, different histories, and different understandings of family and community. As a result I have grown up to be endlessly fascinated by the way language carries culture and being.
I started writing seriously in middle school. At first poetry was a way to express emotion…. Then it became a way to ask questions, and eventually it became a way to think. Moreover, spoken word taught me that poetry could live in the body and voice as much as the ink. Page poetry taught me that language could create entire architectures of thought. I’ve spent the last several years trying to bring those traditions together, and I deeply believe that there is not really a difference between those worlds, as the most masterful poems sound as good when read in the mind or out of the mouth.
Who were some of your earliest champions?
My family was certainly first. They encouraged curiosity and creativity long before I knew what I wanted to do with them. I had been involved in so many arts before poetry: drawing, painting, sculpture, woodworking…and they have been there with me every step of the way.
I’ve also been fortunate to have teachers, mentors, and literary organizations invest in me at critical moments. Programs like the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, the Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship Program, the Institute of Poetry & Praxis, and other communities across Iowa helped me realize that poetry wasn’t simply something I enjoyed; it was something that could become the change I wished to see in the world.
Who are some of the poets and performers who keep inspiring your own creative energies?
The list keeps growing. I often return to Aimé Césaire, Kamau Brathwaite, Lucille Clifton, M. NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, Derek Walcott, Audre Lorde, and Valzhyna Mort.
What attracts me to them is that they don’t treat language as merely descriptive. Language becomes a living material, and history becomes a body that can be acted upon. Memory becomes intimate and dynamic rather than fixed.
I’m also inspired by poets like Yusef Komunyakaa, Nathaniel Mackey, and Seamus Heaney, who remind me that the smallest objects can carry immense historical and emotional weight.
One of your bios describes your writing as work that “explores the intersections of identity, family, politics, and place.” Did you understand this about your own work from the beginning, or how did you arrive at this complex arena of inspirations?
I didn’t understand it at the beginning.
When I first started writing I thought I was writing individual poems, but over time I realized I was asking the same questions repeatedly through different images and narratives.
Many of my poems are interested in inheritance—not just cultural inheritance, but linguistic, bodily, and emotional. I’m fascinated by what survives when something passes from one generation to another. What happens to memory when it becomes language? What happens to language when it becomes a body? Those questions naturally brought me toward family, identity, history, migration, and place.
Please speak to the ways your Nigerian identity fuels your commitment to the arts.
Being Nigerian has shaped nearly every aspect of my artistic life.
Nigerian culture places tremendous value on storytelling. Stories preserve family histories, communal knowledge, traditions, humor, spirituality, and survival. I grew up understanding that stories weren’t decorative. At the deepest level they became a form of responsibility.
My work often draws from Igbo cultural traditions, family histories, foodways, language, and concepts of ancestry. At the same time, I write from the experience of existing between places, a dual perspective that allows me to think about identity as something living and evolving rather than static. Poetry gives me a way to remain in conversation both with the places I come from and with the places I inhabit.
You’re the first National Youth Poet Laureate from Iowa, a state that’s approximately 84 percent white and only 4 percent Black. How did your champions or your family prepare you—how did you prepare yourself—for being such a groundbreaker?
I don’t think anyone can fully prepare for being the first. What my family taught me was to focus on responsibility and not just novelty. Being first is meaningful, but what matters most is what doors become easier [to open] for the next person. I’ve also been fortunate to have mentors who encouraged me to view representation as an opportunity rather than a burden. I never wanted to become a symbol detached from my actual work. My goal has always been to write the strongest poems I can and to create space for other young people to see themselves in literature. The title is important, but the community behind it is what gives it meaning.
We are living through a difficult period in American history in which the immigrant is being depicted as undesirable and unwelcome. Do you hope poetry, and your poetry especially, can change that?
Poetry cannot solve political problems by itself, but it can change the conditions under which people imagine one another. So much prejudice depends upon simplification. Poetry resists simplification…. It insists on contradiction, specificity, and all that it means to be human. As an immigrant, I know that people are often reduced to categories before they are understood as individuals. Poetry offers a counter-practice. It asks readers to inhabit another consciousness, another history, another set of experiences. I’m not interested in writing propaganda. I’m interested in writing poems that make it harder for people to remain indifferent, and ultimately I’m speaking to anyone willing to enter the world of another person with curiosity.
Where do you see yourself a few years from now, and do you envision our country as a more hospitable place for immigrants, artists, and diverse communities?
A few years from now I hope I’m still asking good questions. As for the country, I think history teaches us that progress is rarely linear. There will be setbacks and challenges. But I also believe deeply in the capacity of people to imagine broader possibilities for one another. Artists play an important role in that process. We help preserve memory, challenge assumptions, and expand empathy. I remain hopeful—not because hope is easy but because it is necessary.
Rigoberto González is a distinguished professor of English at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey.
Photo credit: Abiola Kosoko/Demo Lives