At eighteen, Salome Agbaroji had already performed at the United Nations and the White House. She had opened for Rupi Kaur on tour, written for the Golden Globes pre-show, and taken the stage at an NFL Rams halftime show. In 2023, she added a line to that resume that no one else on earth could claim: she became the National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States for 2023–2024 — the first African ever to hold the title.
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For a Nigerian-American girl who grew up in Los Angeles County, that sentence carries weight far beyond the stage.
A Voice Built From Nothing
Agbaroji didn't set out to become a poet. Her spoken word journey began in 2020, through the "Why I Rise" competition, and from there she rose through the ranks of the Get Lit Players, a Los Angeles youth poetry organization. As she later told The Harvard Crimson, becoming a creative writer was never a deliberate decision — creativity, she said, had simply always been present in how she related to language. She credits the vibrant arts culture of the Los Angeles area, where she was born and raised, with helping shape that instinct into a craft.
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That craft moved fast. In 2022, she was named Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate, and the following year she competed for the national title, judged at the National Youth Poet Laureate finals. She won, becoming the seventh person — and, notably, following in the footsteps of the program's inaugural laureate, Amanda Gorman — to hold the national title since its founding in 2017.
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Getlit
Redefining the Craft
Agbaroji has been candid about how exclusionary poetry as a formal discipline once felt to her — a tradition, she's said, that prized elaborate, nature-bound language over the rhythms of everyday life, like a beat made on a lunch table. Her work pushes back against that gatekeeping, reclaiming spoken word as something accessible, urgent, and alive.
Here & Now
Her poetry moves through themes of activism, Black identity, human rights, and femininity — and it hasn't stayed confined to poetry circles. She's been published in NPR's KCRW, Noema Magazine, and the Harvard Technology Review, and in 2023 she became a global ambassador for Vans' brand campaign.
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Roots and Reach
Agbaroji identifies as a first-generation Nigerian American, and that identity threads through her civic vision as much as her verse. Beyond poetry, her advocacy centers on racism against minority communities, immigrant stories, and injustices in the international community. As national laureate, she made it a goal to inspire other Nigerian American poets and to draw attention to the global literacy crisis — writing in her winning application that her primary goal was tackling illiteracy by promoting equity and accessibility within education systems.
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She has described her identity as being an artist at its core, aiming to inspire others through words — a mission she carried to the United Nations itself, where she spoke with UN News during commemorations for the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
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What Comes Next
Agbaroji is now a student at Harvard University, studying Government and Political Science — a pairing that mirrors the dual life she's built as both artist and advocate. Her laureate term ended in 2024, passed to successors Stephanie Pacheco and then Evan Wang, but her place in the record remains fixed: the first African to be named America's youth poet laureate, and a Nigerian daughter who turned language into a platform for a global conversation on justice.