Meet San Francisco’s New Youth Poet Laureates

San Francisco has chosen its new Youth Poet Laureate: 17-year-old Karan Gupta.

Aisha Rae McCulloch, also 17, has been named Vice Laureate. Selected from a group of 16 students attending advanced workshops twice a month since September 2025, the winners were announced during a special ceremony Friday evening in the Koret Auditorium of San Francisco’s Main Library.

The Youth Poet Laureate program was relaunched last year by 826 Valencia, Youth Speaks, the San Francisco Public Library and the Mayor’s Office, taught by a rotation of established writers. These included San Francisco Poet Laureate Genny Lim, who worked with the teens to help hone their craft.

New Youth Poet Laureate Gupta is an Indian American born and raised in San Francisco, who says he inherited a love of writing from his dad. His poem “They say Grief Arrives in an Instant but I Watched You Leave for Months” is about losing his father.

Vice Youth Poet Laureate McCulloch is a student at St. Ignatius College Preparatory, who discovered a love of poetry four years ago while attending a Youth Speaks teen poetry slam. In addition to her passion for poetry, she enjoys film, journalism and spending her spare time with her twin sister and their dog.

Concurrent with the announcement is a newly released anthology of all of the students’ work. I Can Feel You Across the Seas is a reflection of the prodigious talents involved in the program. The book’s 32 poems are uplifting, shattering, consistently engaging and, most of all, vivid reflections of what it means to be a young person living in the Bay in the present day.

The book’s array of perspectives includes imaginative explorations of ancestry and belonging from Mei Chung and Katelyn Wong. Gupta and Paloma Francesca Carrubba explore the impacts of a racist and misogynistic external world on individual internal lives. McCulloch and Zofia Mosur do battle with existential dread using their own words. Ava Perez and Claribel Caamal Amodei write of the terror and trepidation of living under the threat of ICE. Fittingly, the collection also contains lyrical odes to San Francisco itself from Tika Zahiki and Aleksanda “Sasha” Miller.

(Attendees of Claude Forever, the memorial for Cal Academy’s beloved albino alligator, may recognize Miller from her reading of “Claude” in Golden Gate Park earlier this month.)

Throughout the upcoming year, Gupta and McCulloch will act as cultural ambassadors for the city, through civic engagement and sharing of their work. All of the students who participated in the program will appear at Youth Speaks’ Annual Teen Poetry Slam this Spring in San Francisco, which will be livestreamed on Youth Speaks’ YouTube channel.

During the launch of the Youth Poet Laureate Program, Mayor Daniel Lurie noted: “San Francisco’s future is being written right now by the next generation of San Franciscans and these extraordinary young poets. Their voices are bold and reflect the creativity of our city. I’m proud that we are celebrating this talent.”

‘I Can Feel You Across the Seas’ is available to purchase from 826 Valencia’s locations in the Mission (826 Valencia St., San Francisco) and Mission Bay (1310 4th St., San Francisco). It will be available to read online starting Jan. 26, 2026.