On Sunday, May 4, 2025, attendees of the 2025 DC Poet Project culminating reading at the Anacostia neighborhood library selected Malachi Byrd the 2025 winner. Byrd performed alongside finalists Addy Lugo and Micki Topham to a large and appreciative audience. The image above shows the winner with family, friends, and fans after the event.
2025 DC Poet Project winner Malachi Byrd, a graduate of Princeton University with a degree in African-American literature, is a working artist/educator.
Malachi’s selection as the winner comes with the prize of a book contract from Day Eight. We sat down with the 2025 series winner to learn more about his work.
Day Eight: It’s inspiring, every year, to witness the quality of new poetry by DC-resident poets participating in the DC Poet Project. Are you from D.C?
Malachi Byrd: My upbringing was very unorthodox and included a lot of relocation. I was primarily raised in Northeast, D.C., but did experience short stints in Maryland and Virginia. The arrival of gentrification had serious impact on my family’s living arrangements, but everywhere I went I was a representative of Northeast, D.C. I never was able to attach to a neighborhood, but seeing the DMV from different places and perspectives allowed me to develop a more unique identity even as the region evolved over time.
One of the poems you performed at the culminating reading has to do with the loss of your father to gun violence. Would you say a little about that?
Losing my father at an early age led to a complicated grief process that transcended time in a very non-linear way. Dealing with loss as a youth drove me to art because of the ability to fantasize about the world that I truly desired before I could create it. Growing up, I wrote with a yearning for the answers I never had and the intention to create a world able to prevent the trauma my family experienced.
How did you start writing poetry?
Growing up with hip-hop had me writing as a young person, but I was formally introduced to spoken word in tenth grade by teaching artists from the DC literary organization Split This Rock. I fell in love with the concept of slam and then I became obsessed with my work on the page.
You were a youth poet laureate in D.C. and attended a very elite college – Princeton University. Can you tell us a little about those experiences?
When I was selected as the inaugural youth poet laureate of D.C. I was actually in a gap year between my freshmen and sophomore years at Princeton. My first book, Crowning Too Early, was published within the Youth Poet Laureate book series by Penmanship Books. Putting that book together allowed me to fully navigate a junction that no one in my community had experienced before. I decided to make my work a multimedia project to highlight the complexity of the place in life I was, but also I found extreme comfort in being validated for my art in a time where I felt isolated in several different places.
Are there writers that particularly inspire you?
As a student of many genres, I find inspiration from several different types of writers and people. In poetry, Danez Smith and Safia Elhillo motivate me to use every syllable intentionally and to create nuance out of everyday language. In Hip-Hop, Lupe Fiasco guides me toward art that remembers my role as a writer and somebody that understands my context in the community that I care for.
In your biography it mentions that you have taught at more than a hundred area schools. Do you have a preference for age group that you teach? Does your work as a teacher inform your poetry?
At this stage in my career, I have curricula prepared for ages 4-80 and I love everyone that trusts me to guide their educational experiences equally. However, I will say that I do enjoy working with late elementary schoolers and high schoolers very much. From my time in the classroom, the students in fourth and fifth grade have the most enthusiasm and love for life without the fear of being judged by their peers for their differences; the high schoolers have developed their own personas and have had enough life experience to have passions and desires for how the world should be, and I thrive with both of those groups. My work as a teacher informs my work as an artist because I always have to remember how any of my students can stumble across my work at any time. I try to write and perform in remembrance of the artist I needed as a young person.
The theme of the 2025 DC Poet Project series was “Holding to a Vision.” Featured poets in the series, responsible for selecting the finalist poets, included: Maggie Rosen, Sean Felix, Anne-Marie Maloney, Gregory Luce, Joseph Ross, Serena Agusto-Cox, Brandon Douglas, Patience Rowe, Dwayne Lawson-Brown, Amuchechukwu Nwafor, Pacyinz Lyfoung, and Nico Penaranda.
The 2025 DC Poet Project series was hosted by Aaron Holmes, curated by Regie Cabico, and produced in partnership with the Anacostia Coordinating Council through support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and individual donors to Day Eight.