Terisa Siagatonu is an award-winning poet, teaching artist, mental health educator, and community leader born and rooted in the Bay Area. Her voice in the poetry world as a queer Sāmoan woman has granted her opportunities to perform in places such as the White House as a 2012 recipient of President Obama’s Champion of Change Award for her work in her Pacific Islander community, the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris, the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane, Australia, and the 2019 SF Women's March. Terisa's writing/teaching blends the personal, cultural, and political in a way that calls for healing, courage, justice, and truth. A 2022 Emerson Collective Fellow, her work has been published in Poetry Magazine and The Academy of American Poets and has been featured on Button Poetry, CNN, NBCNews, NPR, KQED, Huffington Post, Everyday Feminism, The Guardian, and more.
Since the beginning of Terisa's poetry slam involvement in 2010, she has been a member of several award winning slam teams, including the 2017 inaugural Root Slam Team, helping her team to place 5th in the nation at the National Poetry Slam competition in Denver, CO. When she's not competing, she is coaching college poetry slam teams and mentoring young writers in writing workshops throughout the country. Terisa is one of the co-founders and organizers of The Root Slam, a free bi-weekly poetry venue based in Oakland, CA, voted the 2017 and 2018's Best Open Mic venue in the Bay Area.
Offstage, Terisa creates and facilitates workshops, leads artistic and professional development trainings, provides mental health clinical support, and delivers keynote speeches across the country on issues that inform her 10+ years of community work involving: youth advocacy, educational attainment, Pacific Islander/Indigenous rights, climate change, LGBTQQIA rights, gender-based violence, and others. She holds a Bachelors degree in Community Studies and minor in Education from the University of California- Santa Cruz and a Masters Degree in Marriage/Family Therapy from the University of Southern California (USC), aiming to use her background as a mental health clinician and poet to bridge the gaps in our quest for collective healing and liberation.
Her debut is THE VASTNESS OF US (Dial 2026, illustrated by Lucyola Langi).