9 Afro-Latinx Writers Reshaping the Poetry Landscape

Growing up in New York City, Melanie Luisa Marte discovered poetry during a middle-school field trip to the legendary Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the Lower East Side. "I have been hooked and obsessed with poetry ever since," she tells POPSUGAR.

Her most popular poem, "Afro-Latina," has more 9 million views on Instagram. It's a forceful reclamation of space and visibility for Black Latinas, with powerful lines like, "This is me, no longer flat-ironing my 'fro to fit within the margins of a term dependent on my proximity to whiteness."

Finding inspiration in the work of masters like Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, and James Baldwin, she uses poetry to give a sense of multi-dimensionality to our worlds, to tell her truth, and "to write it boldly, bravely, and beautifully," she says.