 Much of Teresa Cigatano's life's work centers the Pacific. Her first poem came to life in her college dorm room at the University of Santa Cruz 13 years ago. Today she's blazing trails to put the Pacific on the map. We spoke to her at her apartment in Oakland. When I'm invited to events and folks know I'm coming, a lot of times they associate me with the ways in which I've written into the experience of being a first generation queer woman student of college. Her lived experiences have echoed on stages in her hometowns in the Bay Area to college campuses across the nation. Her audience is global, having performed at the White House during the Obama Administration and the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in France. After receiving her master's degree in marriage family therapy from USC, the full-time poet continued to take the stage and organize in her communities. Much of her inspiration comes from close to home. My favorite writer is my grandpa, high chief, he passed away last year, but all my life growing up I had only known him to be a writer. I've only had visions and experiences of him being at his computer typing away from sunrise to sunset. She too can be found writing for hours on end and you'll never hear her say that she's got writer's block. What it is for me is actually this idea of writing being a muscle, the muscle I have to exercise if I wanted to stay strong and so I try my best at the very least in terms of a routine to write every morning. Just free write, not even a goal of finishing a poem or writing a poem, just free write what's in my head currently and let that flow. Offstage, her activism plays a large part in continuing the work of her art. My favorite part about poetry is the responsibility I have after the poems done, that offstage is actually where the work continues, that it wasn't enough to write a poem about something. The poem is just one of the vehicles I use to accomplish these goals. Organizing around climate change, queer women of color and anti-oppression has been a beacon for many young people that come across her. She wants them to know that they matter. I guess the one thing I would want to say to Pacific Islander youth who might be watching this is that I love you, I love you and I need you. We love you, we need you. I want so badly for there to be a world in which you always wake up believing that you are worth this really precious life that we share together. She says that like many other artists, her work is not simply to make art for art's sake. She hopes that the story she continues to tell and still hope in the next generation of artists. Artists are culture shifters, storytellers, people who change other people. There's just no other case in which you can meet someone who wasn't completely changed by a piece of literature, a song, a dance, a film, a poem. Art does that.