With poet laureate fellowship, Raffi Joe Wartanian aims to help Altadena residents raise their voices

Sean Brenner | October 10, 2025

In late 2022, the city of Glendale announced a search for its inaugural poet laureate. The call for entries caught the eye of Raffi Joe Wartanian, a lecturer in UCLA Writing Programs — even though poetry wasn’t his primary form.

“My MFA is in creative nonfiction, and I had written poetry in the past, but I didn’t consider myself a capital-p ‘poet,’” Wartanian said.

Reading the application materials, Wartanian noticed that the position description placed a premium on organizing workshops and developing community-building activities, both of which lined up neatly with his experience. So he applied.

Months later, Wartanian was selected for the role; he has served as Glendale’s poet laureate since 2023.

Recently, Wartanian parlayed that honor into another one: This summer, he was named one of 23 recipients of a poet laureate fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. The fellowship carries a $50,000 award from the Mellon Foundation, which is intended to support the laureates’ own writing and to fund public service activities in their home cities.

As poet laureate, Wartanian dedicated his efforts to highlighting Glendale’s cultural richness, with a particular nod to the city’s large number of residents who, like him, are of Armenian heritage.

Opportunities for self-expression

Now, with the support of the fellowship, Wartanian is turning his attention to the people and neighborhoods affected by the January 2025 Eaton Fire, which claimed at least 17 lives and destroyed thousands of buildings in and around Altadena. Through a project he created, San Gabriel Valley Phoenix Poets, he intends to hold poetry workshops in local K-12 schools and colleges, collect poetry submissions for a published volume and establish scholarships for young poets. He also hopes to commission a public mural and is currently seeking potential artists and a suitable site.

“I thought I could try to bring some poetry into the community, and to create an opportunity for self-expression for people who were impacted by the horrible fire, which is going to take years, if not decades, to recover from,” he said.

The fellowship also gave Wartanian and his fellow honorees the opportunity to meet in Washington, D.C., in early September, and to read their poetry at the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival.

A message for writing students

Wartanian said the fellowship is meaningful not only because of the tangible support it provides for his writing and his community work, but also because the message it sends about the role of poetry in public life.

“It’s such a blessing and gift to be able to focus on your craft,” he said. “It just felt like, ‘This sort of support is what it’s supposed to be like. And this is what it should be like for everybody, not just for me, especially in a country as wealthy as ours. So it means a lot, and it’s something I want to be able to pay forward in whatever way I can.”

At UCLA, Wartanian has taught English composition and creative nonfiction. Over the years, he has tried to impress upon students that their voices and experience matter — “and that you can actually write about them,” he said.

Perhaps not coincidentally, that’s the same ethos that will shape his work with the San Gabriel Valley project.

“I consider poetry the freest form of expression,” he said. “I want to empower people not to give in to the literal silencing that took place because of the fires — or to the metaphorical silencing of voices that’s happening all around us now.”