Award-winning poet Carlos Andrés Gómez shares message for youth at Clovis event
For International Book Award-winning poet and artist Carlos Andrés Gómez, empowering and inspiring audiences with his work is important, especially during challenging times.
That’s what the Colombian American poet aimed to do last week during a poetry workshop and poetry performance at Clovis Community College.
“I hope people feel permission to write their story and feel connected to their voice and recognize that their voice and their story has power and has value,” Gómez said in an interview with The Bee.
Gómez said he is inspired by stories he thinks are overlooked or unseen.
“I want to speak truth to power in my work,” said Gómez, who was born in New York City.
While he has performed in festivals and conferences across the world, Gómez said colleges and universities are one of his favorite places to perform and do workshops. He has performed at more than 200 colleges and universities in the United States.
”I love to be in front of audiences like that, because I think that there’s such a powerful opportunity for us to learn from each other and to share ideas and to wrestle with complex, large problems in a way that I don’t feel the same kind of opportunity and possibility when I’m encountering people that are in different times in their lives,” he said.
After graduating from college, Gómez worked as a social worker in the Bronx, as well as a teacher in the Lower East Side of Manhattan before becoming a full-time artist.
Gómez was cast in Spike Lee’s movie, “Inside Man,” starring Denzel Washington. Since then, he has performed at festivals, written a memoir and appeared in various projects, including HBO series Def Poetry Jam. His coming-of-age memoir, “Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood,” was released by Penguin Random House in 2012.
Gómez is the author of “Hijito,” for which he was awarded the Foreword INDIES Gold Medal and the International Book Award for Poetry in 2020.
Gómez said his first languages were Spanish and Portuguese. Born in New York City, his family moved to Brazil when he was 6 months old, then moved to Cyprus, Switzerland before moving back to United States.
When he was 5 years old, Gómez said his father, an immigrant from Colombia, forbade him and his sister from speaking any language but English.
“I think that he was very afraid that my sister and I would experience what he experienced when he moved to the United States when he was 13 and didn’t speak any English. He had a very hard time when he moved to Miami,” Gómez said, adding that because of that he forgot how to speak Portuguese and much of his Spanish.
Gómez said that is a story that a lot of immigrant families and children of immigrants can relate to.
“There’s complexity when it comes to the language, from the place where your family arrived,” he said.
Gómez has a message to Latino youth in the Central Valley.
“I think we have a tremendous responsibility being American citizens in this very fraught moment to make sure that we are using the privilege and the power that we have as citizens to protect and look out for people who may not be citizens, or who may not be documented,” Gómez said. “I think there’s a lot of responsibility that comes with the power of if you are somebody who has an American passport.”
His most recent book, Fractures, was selected by former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He has been featured on NPR, TEDx, Upworthy, Central Park SummerStage, and partnered with John Legend for Senior Orientation, a program to counteract bullying and champion inclusive masculinity among high school students.
Gómez is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
This story was originally published April 16, 2025 at 11:22 AM.
