Poet, author, teaching artist, and cultural producer whose work examines fatherhood, incarceration, Black cultural memory, and personal transformation. For more than two decades — rooted in East Oakland's EastSide Arts Alliance — I've built platforms where other people's voices can live.
I turn lived experience into a mirror — so people can break the cycle they inherited and rewrite the story they're living.
I came up the long way: East Oakland streets, loss, and a system that counted me out. I turned all of it into words. My work moves across fatherhood, incarceration, Black cultural memory, and personal transformation, and it insists on one idea — we are shaped less by what happens to us than by what we decide it means. In my poems the author is always the student, never the hero.
For more than twenty years my art and my labor have been the same thing: building rooms where other people's voices can live. I host the open mic, coordinate the stage, run the lights, teach the young writer, and keep the weekly circle going. The community is the work.
A few pieces — on the page, on the stage, and in the streets.
The poem projected at the Fox Theater, Beloved Oakland (2018).
Hosting a live poetry night at the EastSide Cultural Center.
Spoken word — the voice the whole practice is written in.
Performing at the prison-justice rally at San Quentin (2012).
Selected. Rooted in EastSide Arts Alliance, East Oakland — where most of this work was done in service of the community, not the spotlight.
Featured & photographed as an 18-year-old poet at the Black Dot (Jan 31, 2003).
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The Museum of the African Diaspora presented an Open Mic featuring DonJuan Carter-Woodard (2022).
Founding and hosting a weekly open mic for Poets of Color at EastSide & Bandung Books.
For readings, workshops, keynotes, curation, or press inquiries.
Email DonJuan Speaking & BookingFiscal sponsorship: EastSide Arts Alliance (501(c)(3)), Oakland.