The Center of the Room

Setting an Example through Words and Action

I met with Azure Antoinette, a Los Angeles-based poet. Read on to see how she turned a major career leap into a role as a leader for young women. 

You know Azure Antoinette is a poet as soon as you hear her speak. Every word she says is carefully thought out, melodic and relaxed, spoken with West Coast candor.

But she wasn’t always a poet. She graduated from high school at 16, and at 22 she worked in human resources in her hometown of Los Angeles. When she got home from work one night and she saw female poet Marty McConnell’s “Instructions for a Body,” on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, something clicked. Soon, she called her mother to tell her she had quit her job.

“You got another job? That’s great!” her mother responded.

“No, Ma,” Azure said. “I quit my job to pursue poetry full-time.”

Her mother hung up on her. While her mother later came to accept her new career move, at the time, Azure understood her reaction—it was a gutsy decision for a 20-something living in Los Angeles to quit a full-time job to become a poet. But it turned out the decision was the right one.

Azure (and yes, that is her real name) went on to write and perform poetry for major names like Maria Shriver and Tuskegee Airman Lieutenant-Colonel Lee Archer, and in 2009, she published her first book of poetry “Bittersweet.” Now, at 28, she is working on her second book, “Brevity.”

“Poetry, to me, has a level of catharsis that speaking doesn’t,” she says. “If I can convince you to listen to what I have to say, then I’ve done my job.”

But her switch from desk job to poet wasn’t the only courageous move Azure has made. She’s taken her role as a well known figure in the Los Angeles area to the role of community leader: as a youth literacy advocate, volunteering for non-profit organizations like Get Lit-Words Ignite, a teen literacy non-profit; and Forgiving for Living, a foundation that empowers victims of abuse by training them in areas that will help them lead productive lives. She also works with young girls through poetry workshops to help them build self-esteem, because she remembers how difficult it was to deal with self-image as a teenager. 

“To me, being a leader is really just practicing what you preach,” Azure says. “It’s easy to talk and give encouragement, but how you actually live is your personal walk, and how you walk when you think no one’s looking is usually when somebody is.

 Check out Azure performing her poem, Listen at the 2010 Women’s Conference for the Minerva Awards: