Empower Wisconsin | Jan. 10, 2020

By M.D. Kittle

MADISON —Angela Trudell Vasquez, Madison’s new poet laureate, is a radical leftist who says America is a land of “white supremacy.” She plans to mentor Madison’s school children in the poet position.

Trudell Vasquez this week was named the city’s event poet laureate and the first Latina woman to hold the position, according to the Capital Times. 

“Everyone can connect in some way or another to poetry,” she told the Cap Times. 

Will she be connecting Madison students to some of her more radical ideas?

The contributor to the Progressive, during a 2018 event in Milwaukee, said the United States must face its history “based on white supremacy and that the roots of racism and colonialism still carry on today.”

Oppression still rules the American system, the new poet laureate proclaimed.

“Sometimes I teach poetry and I tell the kids, ‘How long have we actually been free, those of us that are children of people of color, and are we really free? We’re still operating within a racist system. This is a system. This is not just a country, this is a system,’” Trudell Vasquez.

She concluded her screed with a biographical poem, in which she expresses concerns that her six-year-old nephew dreams of being a police officer.

“… I think about his light afro, how many men with his hair texture spend birthdays behind bars, rot in holes, shake hands with the death penalty, strung from trees like strange fruit for entertainment. He will know this later,” she recited.

That’s the kind of light verse the school kids and council members can expect from the new poet laureate. Yes, poems often open Madison City Council meetings.

As the Cap Times story points out, Trudell Vasquez wasn’t sought for the honorary post. She nominated herself to serve as “an ambassador between the community and poetry,” according to Madison Arts Program Administrator Karin Wolf.

It’s a voluntary gig, but it does come with a $1,500 stipend from the Madison Arts Commission. Wolf says the money is earmarked for a “project of the poet’s choosing.”