ABOUT MALAYA ULAN
Malaya Ulan is the 2026 Northeast Regional Youth Poet Laureate and National Youth Poet Laureate First Runner Up. She served as the 2024-2025 Youth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. Ulan is a community-based multidisciplinary poet whose identity as a Filipino American shapes her craft. She has recently delivered a TEDx Talk at TEDxPenn’s 2025 Conference: Volta on poetry as activism and healing. Ulan has spoken at the United Nations Headquarters during the Fourth Review Conference of the Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons. She is the co-founder of the performance collective AniMalayaWorks—a 2025 NEFA National Theatre Project and 2022 MAPFund grant awardee. Ulan’s poetic documentary “Something About These Waters” was also featured in the Color Congress: Resistance and Joy National Film Festival and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. Ulan is part of the 2025 Top 49 Most Influential LGBTQ+ Leaders of Philadelphia and hosts her radio show, Nay Watchu Cooking on 88.1 and 95.1 FM WPEB West Philadelphia Community Radio Station. Ulan hopes to continue her work bridging communities through storytelling and poetry during her Youth Poet Laureate tenure.
Artist Statement
Malaya Ulan is a Filipino-American multi-disciplinary artivist, whose primary modality- poetry merges with theater, dance, film, and music. Raised in the city of Philadelphia, poetry and protest became synonymous in her vocabulary. Poetry slams, spoken-word performances, and independent filmmaking became weekend activities. Raised in public schools of West Philadelphia, schools that are underfunded, she learned early on that if she wants something, opportunities are not waiting on a silver platter; she needs to fight for it. Applying to the Mighty Writers Program, where she won her first poetry prize at age 10, to WHYY for a scholarship at their journalism program, where she learned to edit and film stories in a few hours, and leading a protest by bringing together 200 students to a walkout, students from different high schools, which she communicated through social media, to demand school funding. Her protest was a speech: Who are we to them? Now living in Miami, where Critical Race Theory and books on Black history are banned, she fearlessly self-publishes a chapbook, "Freedom Rain Speaks," inspired by the Muslim-led newspaper "Muhammed Speaks." As a Filipina raised in Philadelphia, she was taught to have a voice by the strong Black and Brown women of her community. Yolanda Wisher curated her first solo show and interviewed Ursula Rucker for her first poetry documentary, which won the Gary Small Awards, among other honors. As a child of a single mother, an immigrant artist, she found her artist community to be her village of aunties and uncles. She learned early on about the artist scene as a nest conducive to learning, healing, and collective empowerment.