Feminist to Know: Terisa Siagatonu

Terisa Siagatonu is a queer, Samoan poet from the Bay Area. She first rose to prominence as a slam poet, following her time as a first-generation college student at UC Santa Cruz where she discovered the freeing potential of poetry. Siagatonu’s work has garnered her acclaim, and even recognition from President Barack Obama, who presented her with the Champion of Change Award.

Her work combines activism and storytelling to mesh the personal and political. In her poem Atlas, she writes “I tell them that home is a machete/ and that I belong to places/ that don’t belong to themselves anymore,/ broken and butchered places that have made me/ a hyphen of a woman:/ a Samoan-American that carries the weight of both/ colonizer and colonized,/ both blade and blood.” She writes about the experience of belonging to the Pacific Islander diaspora, and the harm of being constantly de-centered and marginalized in the US’ approach to history telling. Her poetry looks at intersections of marginalizations, constantly pressuring for a new point of view that is more expansive.

Siagatonu supplements her poetry with other services that benefit her community in a variety of ways, from providing psychiatric services and therapy to work focused on uplifting AAPI folks. She is currently a mentor for PILOT, a culture-based and community-focused leadership empowerment and development program created to increase the number of emerging leaders in the Pacific Islander community.