At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2023, Poet Ceasar K. Avelar became Pomona’s second Poet Laureate. He took over the reins from David “Judah 1” Oliver, a passionate poet who wears many hats—artist, poet, author, art advisor, and is the Co-Host and Founder of LionLike MindState Poetry and Art Series at the Pomona Fairplex. Avelar steps into the role of Poet Laureate, having become known in the Southern California poetry community for his proletariat-infused poetry and as the host of the monthly open mic “Obsidian Tongues” every second Saturday of the month at Café con Libros Press in Pomona’s Arts Colony. Plus, next year FlowerSong Press will publish his debut poetry collection.

Avelar said on his Instagram page that being the new Poet Laureate of Pomona “was such a blessing…Time to put in the work, time to build new bridges for poetry in Pomona.”

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Avelar was first taken by the power of language in high school, through the Hip Hop that he and his friends listened to. This love of Hip Hop’s wordplay caused this close group of friends to become a Hip Hop family of sorts, inventing rhymes while too many of their peers were out gangbanging.

But it was his dad who sparked his love for ideas. Growing up in El Salvador, his dad became a Marxist Communist and always made sure to make that distinction, to not be mistaken as a Stalinist, as Avelar said on the Write A Way Podcast in 2020, to be mistaken as “a Soviet kind of person.” It matters to him what ideology a person has, not what type of government they claim. Not what they’re making money off of. Because there is too often some form of exploitation behind their ideas. He instilled in Avelar that “there is always back-room agreements in a capitalist society.”

Yet, Avelar’s love of language and ideas didn’t converge until he entered college at 22-23 years old. He chose to attend because he was done working “these shit jobs” as he called them. 9-5s that were just getting him by. He knew by then that he needed to start building a foundation, to start growing as a young man to ensure his future. Once there, Avelar felt “complete in a way.” Information came to him differently. He learned that there were sides to ideas, instead of going through life as a “super consumer,” not giving himself enough time for reflecting, consuming everything he could.

His dad was the first person that pushed Avelar to digest the ideas he began to write about, to acknowledge it, even though he’s not a poet. So, when Avelar first heard poetry, the foundation had been set and he reacted to it by saying “fuck this is real.” Reacting to “poetry that has something to do with “us.”

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Ceasar K. Avelar has come to love Café con Libros Press, the Pomona bookstore “focused on Arts, Literature and Culture.” Every month he can be “in community,” to be around powerful ideas and to share his own. He’s been doing this for 5+ years.

Avelar hosts “Obsidian Tongues” on the same Saturday as the Arts Colony’s monthly art walk, where the usually quiet streets bustle with electricity, live metal and punk rock exploding from The Glass House and The Heaven. Inside the bookstore, the crowds are a decent size, primarily Latinx, with a smattering of whites, Blacks, a few Asians and others.

The open mic cultivates the voices of the people, no pretentions, a mic and a space to speak one’s truth. Open mic performers tend to recite political poems born from experience or made personal, about love and romance or self-care, how they survived generational trauma. This is done in a bookstore founded and run by two first-gen Latina college graduates, Adelaida Bautista and Patricia DeRobles.

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Before Avelar became Pomona’s second Poet Laureate, he’d already begun to expand the community he’s fostered through literature. He began hosting writing workshops with Hope Is Music, another local Pomona artist, originally from Lima, Peru, who spits poetry infused Hip-Hop, at Café con Libros. It was just before COVID shut the entire country down. And last Fall, Avelar set up a small, one day, lit fest at Café con Libros, with James Coats teaching a generating ideas workshop, several local poets such as Anastasia Helena Fenald, Brenda Vaca and Diosa Xochiquetzalcóatl tabling their books, concluding with an open mic, to help support Café con Libros which had been hurt financially when a book deal with a local school fell through.

Now, Avelar has other ideas he wants to implement to continue to build community through literature. One is a workshop series where a different SoCal poet teaches a workshop on a subject of their choice, as a way to encourage the community to write their own stories.

In terms of his own poetry and his duties as Pomona’s Poet Laureate, Avelar is required to write and perform original poetry at selected events and to write a commemorative poem about Pomona. But when asked when he writes his best poetry, he thinks it’s when he’s mad. When something has really gotten him upset.

“I love to be mad,” he said in the same Write A Way Podcast interview. It fuels his proletariat-infused words. Makes them urgent. “It’s like an artform to anger.”