Kai Davis’s two-year term as Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate is nearing its end, so it seems a good time to reflect on both the Poet Laureate program and on Kai’s remarkable impact on our city’s literary community, an impact that started years before her selection and which will continue for many years to come.
Since 2017, the City of Philadelphia Poet Laureate program has served as a powerful tool for elevating the literary arts and encouraging community through the spoken word. Administered by our colleagues at the Free Library of Philadelphia and guided by a governing committee of Philly poets, educators, and arts professionals, the program recognizes exceptional poets who demonstrate a commitment to engaging and inspiring people throughout the city’s neighborhoods.
Poet Laureate is more than a title; it’s a civic position with real responsibility: each laureate serves for two years as an ambassador for poetry and literacy efforts, participating in community service, speaking at events, and mentoring the Youth Poet Laureate. Together, the adult and youth laureates engage with Philadelphia citizens through readings, events, and special projects of their choosing, ensuring that poetry remains a living, breathing part of our city’s cultural fabric.
Kai Davis: Our 2024-2025 Poet Laureate
When Kai Davis received the call that she’d been selected as Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate, she was recovering from flu and COVID shots, feverish and sweating. On the line was Yolanda Wisher, herself a former poet laureate, close family friend, and chair of the Poet Laureate Governing Committee. “She has this smooth way of talking, and she calmly told me that I got the position,” Davis recalled in an interview. “Once it really did hit me, we were both tearing up.”
It was a full-circle moment that speaks to the make-up of Philadelphia’s poetry community, which nurtures, mentors, and elevates its own. Kai had been selected to join a distinguished lineage of poets who have served as ambassadors for the power of poetry.
Kai is one of the youngest poets to hold the position of Poet Laureate, but her resume is that of an artist who has done hard, meaningful work for years. A Black Queer writer, performer, and teaching artist, Kai started writing poetry in her teens. She has spoken about how, at 15, she attended the Germantown Poetry Festival and was struck by the power of spoken word performance. She wanted to be part of that world.
Since then, Kai’s impressive career has spanned performance, education, and publishing. She’s performed for TEDx Philly, CNN, BET, PBS, and NPR, and has given readings and speeches at venues from the San Francisco Opera House to New York’s storied Nuyorican Poets Cafe. She’s also won two international grand slam championships (Brave New Voices in 2011 and The College Union Poetry Slam Invitational in 2016).
What’s perhaps most telling about Kai, though, is where she chooses to spend her time: teaching poetry to marginalized and underserved youth in high schools and local nonprofits across Philadelphia.
“Poetry is a community practice,” Kai has said, explaining that she believes “the poet laureate’s duty is to gather people on the margins and bring them to the center so that we can find and love one another.”
Kai’s work explores Blackness, Queerness, womanhood, grief, and the many ways these themes converge. Through four published chapbooks and numerous journal publications, Davis’s writing attempts to demystify our most overwhelming experiences, from structural racism and misogyny to ancestral trauma, mental health, and Queer love.
Kai’s vision for her tenure as Poet Laureate has been ambitious: “Philly is filled with people who have [the] ability to use lyricism creatively, to connect with one another, to build communities with one another. As poet laureate, my job is to give all these people their flowers while they’re still here, and to draw attention to the work that’s happening.”
The Poet Laureate program represents our commitment to making poetry accessible, celebrating diverse voices, and ensuring that the power of the written and spoken word continues to inspire people across all of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods.
In Kai Davis, we have a laureate whose commitment to bringing voices from the margins to the center, to giving flowers to poets while they’re still here, and to building community through the power of words reflects everything we believe about the transformative potential of literature and the arts.
Thank you Kai.