Desireé Dallagiacomo is a writer, educator, and space creator. She is of Chahta and European descent, and is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Her book of poetry, SINK (Button Poetry, 2019), is available here or wherever books are sold in real life and on the internet.
After 12 years in the deep south, She recently returned to Northern California where she is a sister, an auntie, and a lifelong student of community. She teaches poetry & creative writing in public schools, private schools, and on the internet. She began teaching in public schools 14 years ago with the youth spoken word organization WordPlay (now housed within Humanities Amped) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Previously the program and artistic director for the largest youth spoken word organization in Louisiana, she is now a freelance teaching artist and an adjunct creative writing teacher at Baton Rouge Magnet High School.
In 2016, she founded The Heart of It, an intimate and intensive writing retreat for poets and writers of marginalized genders. It started as a small passion project and has become a vibrant network of writers from all over the United States. Applications open in late summer, and the retreat takes place on the Mendocino Coast.
Desireé’s pull toward writing began as a teenager, when she began exchanging weekly letters with her incarcerated brother, housed in a maximum security prison in California. She started performing in poetry slams and open mics in 2009, and she has been a finalist at every major poetry slam in the United States. From 2010-2018, she was a member of many poetry slam teams in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. She went on to coach youth and adult poetry slam teams, and in 2017 she coached the Baton Rouge youth poetry slam team to an international championship at the largest youth poetry slam festival in the world, Brave New Voices.
Desireé spent many years teaching, organizing, and building spoken word curriculum and community alongside writers and scholars from the deep south and beyond, where she also developed her writing practice. It is with that mentorship and knowledge that she strives to create communities of belonging through poetry and writing pedagogy.
Before dropping out to be a poet, she studied creative writing at The University of New Orleans. A lifelong student, she is communally taught and trained. At 32 years old, she went back to school to complete her undergraduate degree. She is currently an undergraduate student at University of California, Santa Cruz where she is majoring in Feminist Studies and a student of the VAST program (Visualizing Abolition Studies).
Currently, Des leads a weekly writing workshop, teaches at Baton Rouge Magnet High, and is writing her second full-length collection of poetry along with a memoir.
If you want to read her current work, subscribe to her substack.
For her CV, click here.