Nico Amador on the symbiotic relationship between poetry and social justice work
by Emma Fiona Jones via The Provincetown Independent
Nico Amador on the symbiotic relationship between poetry and social justice work
Nico Amador.
Nico Amador came to poetry by way of community organizing.
“Poetry and activism for me developed in relationship to each other,” says Amador, a writing fellow at Provincetown’s Fine Arts Work Center. Originally from San Diego and currently living in rural Vermont, he became politicized as an undergraduate in the early 2000s at U.C. Santa Barbara, as students responded to “the conservative turn that was happening in all of our communities,” he says. He spent his early activist days organizing against militarism in the post-9/11 environment, participating in a statewide student “education not incarceration” campaign, and volunteering in electoral campaigns.
“As part of organizing work, we wanted to put on the kinds of social events that would bring people into the issues we were working on,” he says. Often, those events included the spoken word; it was in such settings that Amador first found his footing as a poet.
His poems exhibit an activist bent yet never cede beauty to ideology. Through his academic work — he earned his B.A. in English and Black studies — Amador’s voice began to shift away from a spoken-word style, but a sense of rhythm remains present. “Maggot Rhyme” begins:
Obstinate boy, hot mess.
Sun on bare ribs, cigarettes.
Arm-tattooed, sailor.
Salty-mouthed, failure.
After college, Amador spent the next two decades fighting for trans rights, queer liberation, and racial justice. He has poured his energy into efforts to end mass incarceration, secure protections for undocumented immigrants, and end a public transportation system policy that discriminated against trans and gender nonconforming passengers in Philadelphia. His proclivity for shapeshifting is evident in the many roles he has played in pursuit of social justice, from executive director of the organization Training for Change to trainer and facilitator of hundreds of workshops for organizations including Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, the Transgender Law Center, and Greenpeace.
