Paola Capó-García, raised in Puerto Rico with a blank journal at 14 years old, decided to write a poem to see how it felt to write poetry and what emotions she could capture. Rhyming pain with rain, writing poetry taught her how freeing it can be, letting go of emotions, thoughts, and feelings as you experiment with language.
“It felt exciting to write something that wasn’t just an essay, a memoir or a short story,” she recalled. “Those are all the things that I had written in my English classes. So it felt cool to experiment with a different form and have something that was really raw and true to my experience at that moment.”
Capó-García, ever since that moment, has always loved writing, shown through serving as editor of her school’s newspaper and enjoying essay assignments for her English classes. Nevertheless, she found her place in poetry.
Evolving as a poet, she learned how vital it is to build a relationship with your community. In high school, she took part in poetry workshops, where she met other writers and creative people. This experience excited her for what was to come in college.
Attending Syracuse University, she became involved with the school’s literary journal. She also enrolled in all of the poetry classes available. Through this, she found her community while gaining confidence in voicing how she felt about her experiences.
She also cites poetry as teaching her how to organize events, something that she would come back to as the San Diego Poet Laureate later on. When she became the editor of the literary journal at Syracuse, she reached out to different people across the campus to submit work. When her time came to a close, she graduated with a BS in Magazine Journalism and English & Textual Studies.
Capó-García worked as a journalist for several years, all the while missing poetry, being in the classroom, and analyzing poems. She couldn’t ignore the calling any longer. Therefore, she went back to school and received a MFA in creative writing from UC San Diego and an MA in English from UC Davis, opening the door for her to be a teacher.
“Teaching is the thing that, I think, got me to be the San Diego Poet Laureate because of all the years teaching poetry and being able to articulate what I think a good poem is, being able to empower other people to write great poems, and putting together large-scale projects that involved poetry,” she explained.
Louise Glück, Claudia Rankine, and William Carlos Williams, poets in their own right, serve as her main inspirations, as well as Ada Limón, the former US Poet Laureate. At the moment, she cites Daniel Borzutsk as another inspiration.
Through all of this, though, there is one thing that poetry has brought to Capó-García that nothing else could: clarity.
“[Poetry] holds you accountable to say something very precisely, to observe the world in very keen, very specific ways. It’s helped me to both speak more plainly and pushed me to embrace abstraction, so a healthy balance between being literal and being abstract,” she explained.
For Capó-García, poetry, like all art, is a reminder to slow down. It’s a reminder to process the things around you, especially in today’s fast-track era where we go from text to text, media to media. A poem gives you the opportunity for freedom and space, two things that are much needed today.
Teaching for 14 years taught her that it’s impossible for someone not to connect with any art. She has found that everyone can write a poem because we all have specific experiences, or there are poems out there that we all relate to due to certain things or certain languages.
In the classroom, she emphasizes the importance and impact that poetry can have through readings as well as analyzing and writing poetry. It helps everyone be their most empathetic selves by connecting English class with the real world and encouraging students to take what they’ve learned into their communities.
“The classroom and the community are the same kind of space where I get to show people how accessible, how inclusive, how welcoming a poem is. Even when it’s super challenging, it is an invitation,” she said.
Capó-García integrates her Puerto Rican upbringing through poetic Easter eggs that pay homage to her country. The use of Spanish and English are also prevalent in her work. In the classroom, she also showcases Puerto Rican writers through select books.
To her, being bilingual is more than just beneficial, as many of her students as Spanish-speaking.
“To be able to connect with them so intimately through Spanish… it’s just a different relationship when you can connect with students linguistically and culturally. I’m Puerto Rican, the majority of my students are Mexican, and I live here in San Diego.” She continued, “Being able to empower them to use their languages in their poetry, when oftentimes they’re told to turn that off in an English class, that to me is super, super important that we preserve their languages in our classes and in any sort of expression.”
On January 30, 2025, Capó-García was appointed 2025-2027 San Diego Poet Laureate. In this role, the laureate develops programs, events, builds connections with the city to bring poetry to people and make it accessible to people, all in the span of two years.
She has been heartened by the fact that so many libraries and different cultural institutions in San Diego have expressed interested in poetry. She recounted her inbox being flooded by librarians, branch managers, museums and spaces, all looking to do events with her in the name of poetry.
During her tenure as Poet Laureate, Capó-García hopes residents of San Diego understand the value poems can bring to your life.
“I hope that it makes them then go off and buy a book of poetry or check out a book of poetry from the library,” she concluded. “I hope it maybe makes them not necessarily go off and write if they don’t want to, but to continue to read [poetry], to understand its value in one’s life.”
Photo courtesy of Alfredo Castellanos Hambleton / Interviewed on November 12, 2025
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