Hope Austin is Spokane’s first youth poet laureate

Spokane Arts has announced the city’s first youth poet laureate, which officially launched the 2026 two-year term with a reading this week at the Kendall Yards Night Market.

University High School sophomore Hope Austin was selected to serve as the program’s first. The program itself started with the current (adult) poet laureate Mery Smith, who brought the idea to Spokane Arts.

“I talked to Spokane Arts about it, like pretty much Day 1, and then they’re like, ‘Okay, let’s do it,’ ” Smith said.

Smith partnered with Spokane Arts program director and local musician Devonté Pearson to assemble a community board to lead the selection process.

“We tried to pick people from the community that were, you know, at least had a pulse on youth, and also a diverse group,” Smith said.

Word spread through local poetry programs and events, and soon Smith and Pearson had more than 30 applicants.

“And that was a great, big number. I mean, for our first time, I was shook,” Smith said.

Thanks to the clear voice in her work and record of participation in the poetry community, Austin was chosen for the position.

“I was so excited. I think I was sick at the time, but I got out of bed, and I literally started screaming. I was so excited. I called my friends and family and was like, ‘Yo, I’m youth poet laureate now!’ ”

During the two-year term Austin will work alongside Smith, starting this summer at Spark Central with a youth poet cohort program that provides workshop and performing opportunities. Students who perform their work are given a $15 voucher to the Kendall Yards Night Market.

As Smith and Austin enter the first stages of the program, their early discussions will help plot the course for what Austin’s community engagement will look like over the next two years.

“Getting kids interested in poetry and interested in just learning about the world around them and interested in literature in general is really important …” Austin said. “I’m really excited to work with a bunch of little kids who probably have wilder ideas than I do. And I’d like to be inspired by them and I’d like them to be inspired by what I do.”

Austin describes herself as a voracious reader from a young age, reading “book after book after book.” Some of the books contained poetry, and it caught her attention. But it was joining debate club freshman year that cemented her passion.

“I joined my school’s debate club, and for the first time ever, that year, Washington had an event that was based around original spoken word poetry. And I was like, ‘That’s totally my jam,’ ” said Austin.

“I just discovered that I really had this love for not only writing it, but then speaking it out loud and performing it.”

Austin’s work focuses primarily on lived experiences she’s had with family and friends, and she sees the tradition of poetry as something of a living document that showcases how people through the eras perceived the world around them. Her love for the medium is matched only by her love for its community.

“I think one of the biggest things I realized is that everybody else that does poetry is also rooting for you just as much as you’re rooting for them,” Austin said.

Austin first explored her love for performing in theater, but chuckling she admitted, “I can’t sing, and it wasn’t something that I ended up doing longterm. I didn’t enjoy the community as much. And so when I found a way that I got to perform, and it was something that I had written. It felt just really special.”

For other aspiring young poets, Austin encourages them to not compare themselves to others and to share their work even when they’re scared.

“I’m somebody who’s always so worried about what people think of me, and I think that’s what stops a lot of people from going out there and performing or reading or going and watching, is this fear of, like, ‘I don’t want other people to know what I’m thinking, and I definitely want, don’t want them judging how I perceive the world.’ So I think you have to be confident, you have to go out there, even if you don’t know what you’re doing,” Austin said.