BYA Poetry Workshop with Guests Alyesha Wise and Matthew Hernandez!

Last Tuesday we were joined by poets Alyesha Wise and Matthew ‘Cuban’ Hernandez. The two read poems and engaged youth in a workshop of poetry as a means of healing. Read more about them below!

Alyesha Wise is an award-winning published poet, teaching artist & TEDx speaker from Camden, N.J. Currently residing in LA, she is the co-founder of Spoken Literature Art Movement, an organization providing poetry education and extensive programming for poets and the Director of Program Development for Street Poets, Inc., an organization mostly serving juvenile injustice-involved youth with mentorship and arts programming. Alyesha has been featured on platforms and in publications such as OWN TV, Huffington Post, Bustle, Afropunk, PBS, POPSUGAR, Buzzfeed and more. Other collabs include the ACLU, The Shabazz Center, The Nantucket Project, Brave New Films and the Google Interstellar Project. However, Wise believes that her greatest collab is in her advocacy of love and liberation. Ron Howard once wrote about Alyesha's work, "Very Powerful."

Matthew ‘Cuban’ Hernandez is a poet, speaker, and performance coach from Jacksonville, Florida. He has toured as far as Abu Dhabi and nearly every major city in the United States and Europe, performing, teaching and coaching poetry. Matthew is currently the Director of Juvenile Programming for Street Poets, Inc and Co-founder of Spoken Literature Art Movement (S.L.A.M.). A 2018 Four Corners Fellow and a teaching artist for nearly ten years, Matthew has spent the last four years working in youth detention centers across Los Angeles County. He has opened for artists such as Wu-Tang and featured for platforms such as BuzzFeed and NPR. Matthew is also a three-time Southern Fried poetry slam champion and an award-winning poetry coach. Cuban’s favorite activity is making people feel great; sometimes he does this through poetry.