Jersey City’s Poet Laureate Launches a Poetry Festival

by Tris McCallSeptember 15, 2025

The Jersey City Poet Laureate position, her predecessors told her, could be whatever she wanted to make of it. This is what Melida Rodas has made of it: a three-day event devoted to writing, spoken word, and the many other arts adjacent to literature.

The inaugural Jersey City Poetry Festival turns the spotlight on scores of verse-spinning performers, including appearances by prior city Poet Laureates Rashad Wright and Ann Wallace. Among the headliners at an all-day talent exhibition on Saturday, September 20 at the Museum of Jersey City History (298 Academy St.) are the charismatic poet Jeff Dess, Cuban electric violinist Le Fiddler, and performer and filmmaker Cara Hagan, who’ll interpret a memoir by NJCU creative writing professor Edi Giunta through dance. In a very Jersey City move, Rodas and her team of first-time Festival organizers have chosen to honor an art form and its many local practitioners by gathering the tribes, pitching the tent as wide as they can, and inviting everybody to the party.

Also in keeping with Jersey City event-making tradition, the offerings are varied, and the attitude is collaborative and multidisciplinary. On Friday, September 19, there’ll be a networking event at the Stork Club (2 Chapel Ave.) where attendees are encouraged to dress in the guise of their favorite poet or lyricist. Local wordsmiths will be at the party, but there’ll also be appearances by the defiantly unclassifiable musician Giselle Bellas and the Jersey City Cabaret. Programming on Sunday, September 21 at the MJCH is devoted to young writers and kids’ workshops: Diana Lee Santamaria of the bilingual series of children’s books DLee will stop by, as will percussionist Carmen Arrojo, the members of the Hudson County youth musical theater City Kidz Playhouse, and many others. Visitors are invited to tour a sculpture garden, curated by Tina Maneca, that includes work by the acclaimed local artists Jerome China, Josh Urso, and Gail M. Boykewich.

But it’s the wall-to-wall programming on Saturday that’s drawing the most attention and anticipation. Jersey City Poetry Festival organizers are supplementing a long roster of readings by local spoken word artists with open mics, panel discussions, a dance performance, vendors, a typewriter workshop, and an installation of short films, picked and sequenced by Rodas herself, designed to accompany poems. It’s a lot to absorb. But this varied program has a unifying theme, and it’s one that has been inspiring poetry for centuries: sustainability and the preservation and appreciation of the natural world. Rodas, who traces her belief in environmental justice to her upbringing in Guatemala, sees parallels between care of the wider physical world and community-building in Jersey City. 

The Poet Laureate, who is a self-effacing sort when not onstage, is adamant that the festival is not about her. She’s quick to give credit to her collaborators, including Maneca, Hagan, and poet and activist LGBTQ+ activist I. Buenaventura, aka Patrick. But it’s fair to say that the Poetry Festival wouldn’t have launched if she hadn’t given it a healthy push. We caught up with Melida Rodas for a conversation about festivals, opportunity in Jersey City, and her own trajectory as an immigrant, a teacher, an activist, and a relentless dreamer.

Tris McCall/Jersey City Times: Anybody who has encountered your poetry wouldn’t be surprised that you’ve made a commitment to ecology central to the Festival. Your writing is alive with the sounds, images, and rhythms of nature. How did that happen? What motivates you, if you’ll pardon the Dr. Seuss reference, to speak for the trees? 

Melida Rodas: I was born in Guatemala City, but my grandparents were from a remote village called San Agustin. They had land, and that land had fruit trees — lemons, mangos, tamarind trees — and that was the way they made their living. As a child I’d watch my uncles, my mom, my grandparents pick the fruit, put it in giant nets and sell it, dirt cheap and in bulk, to people who’d transport it to the city market. It was hard work, but it was also beautiful.

Later, my family moved to Antigua Guatemala, which used to be the capital of the country until an earthquake forced Guatemalans to move it to Guatemala City. It’s a place with amazing old architecture, Spanish architecture, colonial architecture, cathedrals, cobblestone roads with horses on them. It’s in a valley surrounded by volcanoes, because there are so many volcanoes in Guatemala. That was the horizon, wherever you looked: greenery and volcanoes.

All of that lushness — the volcanoes, the trees, the oceans on the Pacific and Atlantic side because Guatemala has both, the waterfalls, the rainforest — is so deep within me. That’s why I wanted to make our mission about climate justice. I know how gorgeous this world is. Can we please not destroy it?

TMC/JCT: Do you identify with the tradition of naturalism in world poetry? Locating the profound, and profoundly human, in the wild environment?

MR: Oh, yes. Robert Frost, Thoreau, John Muir, they all had that sensitivity. I loved how they use poetry as a way to honor the earth. They were spot on when they were writing and talking about nature and preservation.

If I’d been born here, if all I knew was city life, I think my sensitivity might be different. I remember walking into the rainforest for the first time, and taking that first breath. It smelled so sweet, like nothing I’d ever smelled before. I felt like my lungs were thanking me. Everything there is so full, so big, because there’s room to grow. The leaves are so big. The bugs are so big! 

Visiting those kinds of places, bathing in thermal pools or watching the amber glow of a faraway volcano in the middle of the night from the patio of my aunt’s house, these were the experiences that shaped me. That’s what I’ve seen, that’s what I know, that’s what I write about, and that’s what I like to spend time advocating for.

TMC/JCT: How did the lessons of the upbringing affect the way you’ve approached the position of Poet Laureate? How you’ve decided to put together the Festival?

MR: Growing up in Guatemala, I’d see the women working in co-ops, some breastfeeding while doing textiles, others cooking to feed all the children while the men were cutting wood for the fireplace. Even in my own family, it was like that. We’d always work cooperatively. I’ve written a lot about elephants. They have matriarchs, but they all always work and move together to protect each other and their children. 

I know how to do that. One of my strong suits is putting people together. I didn’t want anything about this Festival to be a unilateral decision from me — I didn’t want to be like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia. We have such a strong community in Jersey City. It was important for me to assemble a team that understood how to work together and in an interdisciplinary way. 

There’s no handbook to be a Poet Laureate. When I was named, I thought, okay, so what do I do now? And they said to me that everyone makes of it what they will. You can put your own flavor to it. There’s a lot of breathing room.

TMC/JCT: Did you start working on the event immediately?

MR: I knew I wanted to do a citywide poetry Festival. I created a pitch deck and went to Christine Goodman at Cultural Affairs and Amy De Jong at the Jersey City Arts Council and said “what say you?” They told me it sounded like a great idea. There’s no money, but we can help you market it. I put together the website, created a program, a concept, and most importantly, a team.

I am a poet, but my degree is in fine arts and sculpture. I’m also a teacher and an activist. I am all those things. When I started picking a team, I knew I was looking for other people with broad experiences who’d worked across disciplines. [Curator] Tina Maneca made sense to me because she’s worked with so many different types of artists. She may not be a poet, but she’s a poetic person. She gets it. I brought Patrick on board because I wanted the LGBTQ+ community to be well represented. Patrick is a transmasculine person who has written a book about self defense for women who have been assaulted. He has been through the transformation from a woman to a person who identifies as transmasculine. He is deep in the culture and understands it in a way that I could only try to do.  

SJ is our poet liaison. Because I don’t really read all that often, I needed someone who is always out and at the open mics, like a butterfly hopping from one flower to the next. Some of our headliners are bigger than life and can take up all the light in their room, and that’s great. But I want the smaller voices to be heard, too. That’s where SJ came in.

The interdisciplinary artists were the ones I gave myself homework to find. I took my time to unearth the diamonds — those unicorns, the people who could do so many things and put them together in interesting ways. For instance, Sofia Carrasco Iglesias writes poetry, but she is also a saxophonist, an illustrator, and a painter. Cara Hagan is an amazing dancer, and she’s going to dance to one of my poems. We’re going to have a screening of film poems. I curated that myself.

TMC/JCT: Did your work with the Arts and Culture Trust Fund [Rodas was the Ward A representative on the grantmaking board for the past three years] help you find any of those unusual voices? 

MR: It made things much easier for me. Being involved with the Fund means I get to see who is new, who is coming in, who has a new project. I get to see bios. I have access to data. 

And I am always proud to represent Greenville, on and off of the Arts and Culture Trust Fund committee. I live on Terhune Avenue, on the West Side of the Boulevard, but I’ve lived on the East Side, too, and that wasn’t always fun. I’ve taught at the Barack Obama School. Whenever I teach poetry workshops, I always choose to do them at the Greenville Library. I want my neighborhood kids to have everything that everybody else does. I know that poverty is a thing in my neighborhood. I know that many of the women are suffering. So while I’m always out and all over the city, you’ll find me over there, mostly, because that’s where they need me.

TMC/JCT: The kickoff party and networking event on the first night of the Festival is in Ward A. How and why did you choose the Stork Club for that?

MR: I love Frank and Jeanne Cretella, the owners of Landmark Hospitality and the Liberty House. They’re beautiful, grounded, salt-of-the-earth people with big hearts who do a lot for the community. The Stork Club was a very exclusive place in New York City back in the day — it was frequented by Marilyn Monroe, the Rat Pack, and the Kennedys. Frank and Jeanne bought the trademark and reinvented it. The Stork Club is now right at the end of Port Liberté.

I thought it would be interesting to have an event there and invite all the poets from the city who might not ordinarily come to places like that. When you walk in, it’s so beautiful. I want everyone to have that experience and feel like they belong there. I want everyone to be where I am, and where they might not ever have been. 

TMC/JCT: Why pick the Museum of Jersey City History as the host for the rest of the Festival?

MR: Poets are writers and history is the written archive of our culture. History is how we document our story.

I first approached them after the ribbon cutting for their Frank Hague play. I told them I’d like to curate events there. I was working on a number of vignettes at the time, filming Jersey City city poets. I could envision them there on one of their monitors or projectors.

I’ve worked with blue chip artists and dealers. But I am also a first generation immigrant brown woman, and I wanted poets and other everyday people to feel like their work is going to be in a museum. I wanted them to feel like the door was open, and I wanted to be to one to open that door. Curator Mariana Morete is bringing forty mosaic artists. It’s folk art. When else are they going to be able to say that their work was in a museum?

TMC: That desire to be a door-opener is another consistent theme in your work. Is it fair to say that motivation goes as deep as your drive for environmental justice?

MR: The immigrant story is extremely important to me: the treatment of people who come here with nothing but dreams. In Guatemala, my dad was a CPA, and I saw him go to work every day in a suit and tie. But here, he became a dishwasher.

When I returned to Guatemala at the age of 18 for my grandfather’s funeral, I found a notebook with my dad’s name on it. I hadn’t realize that when I was four years old, he’d gone back to school to study philosophy. He was a thinker. He was the one who took me to see the ruins of Tikal to understand our culture. He had a thirst for knowledge and a desire to know the world. It breaks my heart that someone with that sort of mind and soul would come here and not get the opportunity to do more than wash dishes. For him to get treated the way he did and then pass away… I can’t even tell you what that is like for me.

TMC/JCT: Did you want to write poetry from a young age?

MR: In school, I was a little oddball because I always liked art, writing, and hanging out with the little subculture of creative kids. That’s when I first started becoming interested in poetry. Friday was the special day in creative writing class where we got to bring in song lyrics as poems, so I’d bring in lyrics by the Smiths, the Cure, Depeche Mode, and we’d analyze and dissect them as you would a poem.

But even in college, my primary focus was visual art. I took creative writing at NJCU as an elective out of curiosity. It was Professor Ellen Gruber Garvey who directed me to Professor Edi Giunta’s class. I told her I was an art major. She said: you don’t understand — you can write. You need to explore that further.

I tried to get out of it. Eventually I gave in and went to Professor Giunta’s class. She gave us a prompt, and we had fifteen to twenty minutes to write something. After she heard what I wrote, she told me I had to stay in the class. She saw something in me that I really did not see in myself. 

I loved to write — I always did — but it was so personal to me that I didn’t know if I wanted anybody to know what I wrote about. So much of it was deep and sad and personal, and when people read it, it made me feel naked. But with Edi, I learned to be braver. And it got easier and easier. Edi invited me to read at Barnes & Noble in Hoboken, and again, I tried to get out of it. I was so nervous that I was shaking. But when I got off the microphone, people approached me and said: that’s my story. They were Muslims, Asians, Latinas, mostly women, I noticed. I thought: I would like to repeat this. I’d like to know how this story of mine can benefit other people. Maybe I need to put my fears aside and embrace the love of my community instead.

TMC/JCT: How did you become so deeply involved with the arts and culture scene in Jersey City?

MR: The first time I got a grant in Jersey City was 2008 or 2009. It came from ProArts and Sustainable JC, and it was for a poetry and projection project. I love projection mapping because it’s ethereal, and it’s also environmentally friendly. I showed them my poem and my projector. Do you see how there’s no waste? This tiny projector can create a million projects. That was the first time I dipped my toe in, and I was thinking, again, about the planet.

It’s important to me to explore projection mapping and poetry together. I work with a projection mapping community in Asbury Park. I helped put together the Color & Light Festival in Asbury in March. As soon as I finish with this Festival, I’ll start working on the second Color & Light.

TMC/JCT: Will there be a projection element to the Jersey City Poetry Festival?

MR: I’m working on that. I have so many little surprises for the community. I promise you this: there’s going to be a wow factor.