Aris Kian’s creative journey began when she penned her first poem at 10 years old. While it was never planned, those stanzas were just her first step toward becoming the Houston Poet Laureate for 2023–2025. In April, mayor Sylvester Turner announced the native Houstonian as the city’s sixth and youngest laureate at age 25.

“I'm very grateful. Having my family proud of me, having my friends proud of me, and having my community proud of me is an unmatched feeling. I feel very humbled.” Kian says.

With her passion for artistic expression and activism, Kian’s goal is to bridge the two worlds as a means to amplify voices that often go unheard, and to funnel resources back into the very community that shaped her.

“It’s a really huge title and it can really give you a lot of opportunities on a national, state, and regional scale. But that’s not my priority,” Kian says. Rather, she wants to use her role as Houston Poet Laureate to ensure the needs of local organizations are met using resources the city has available to them.

When she was younger, a spark was ignited by the discovery of Button Poetry on YouTube, an independent publishing company known for its viral slam poetry videos. She remembers those early years watching spoken word performances and writing poems with her close friend Chynna and sister Quia. Once Kian started college in 2018 at the University of Houston, she joined the school’s poetry slam team, CoogSlam. Her competitive nature, thrill of performing, and the connections she made with other poets fueled her love for storytelling.

“When we went to compete and became finalists, I was like, Oh I actually really love this,” Kian says. “I became obsessed. I got the bug.”

In 2019, CoogSlam ranked No. 4 in the nation at the 2019 Association of College Unions International Poetry Slam Invitational. Through the years, Kian participated in various slam competitions including Women of the World Poetry Slam, where she ranked No. 10 in 2020 and No. 2 in 2023. In 2022, Kian received the Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing from Inprint, validating her journey and acknowledging her as a torchbearer for the next generation of creative writers. While she continued writing verses, Kian began her master's in creative writing and found a passion in community activism.

After becoming involved with Mutual Aid Houston, Houston Abolitionist Collective, and Texas Housers, Kian’s mission was born: to be a vessel and a voice, not only for personal narratives, but for all of the unsung heroes of change.

“I think that’s another reason why I was chosen as the Houston Poet Laureate,” Kian says. “Because my main platform is thinking about community organizing and the role that storytelling and poetry has in those communities.”

After graduating with her master's in 2022, she was hired as the narrative change and media manager for the nonprofit Houston in Action, where she currently works. “This is my first full-time job out of grad school and when I got it, I was like, this role was made for me,” she says.

In her position, which was specially created for Kian, she facilitates a “narrative working group” that includes a variety of organizations throughout the city who are interested in creating a vocal platform for media outreach, helping with voter engagement strategies, reshaping narratives that corrode their specific communities, and more.

“It’s really about how well we can create a system that thinks through everybody’s ideas for the communities of focus, which of course is Black, Latinx, AAPI, low income, BIPOC, and queer systems and people impacted the most in Houston,” Kian says. “We want to make sure that the organizations that focus and actually have hands in this work are the experts leading the narrative.”

As Houston Poet Laureate, Kian was granted $20,000 and works closely with the Mayor's Office of Cultural Affairs and Houston Public Library to execute her community outreach project, “Space for Us: Afrofuturism and the Poetic Imagination.” Guided by her beliefs in language justice, Kian is sculpting a path for poets of all backgrounds and cultures to meet through workshops, where people can create their own declarations or creative manifestos for how they want to better their city.

“I'm trying to think through things like, what's a resource that I can offer? How can I make sure I get as many fun brilliant poems out of this as possible and create an avenue for people to create more work?” Kian says.

She’s also dismantling the conventional idea of the poet laureate role by pivoting the spotlight from herself to the community she cherishes. “If it means I’m able to utilize the time to introduce different neighborhoods to different poets or different local organizations and institutions to different writers and creatives, if I’m able to cross-collaborate on work, then that’s where my interest lies,” Kian says. “So, it’s less about me. I’m just thinking of how I can showcase the brilliance of this international, global, multilingual, multicultural city, by means of the Houston Poet Laureate project.”

Amid her increasing number of responsibilities, Kian remains a steadfast poet, often using the city as her muse. She wrote her favorite line she’s ever written about the ebbs and flows of Houston: “A city is a scab, and we pick it with impatient hands.” This is her love letter to Houston, one that narrates a complex and imperfect place that mirrors her commitment for positive change while simultaneously feeling its downfalls.

“The amount of growth that is being done is by means of these very hungry and tenacious organizers that are actively trying to heal it. But in the same city and in the same breath, there’s so much work that’s removing that healing and that growth,” Kian says. “I love the city so much and I’m actively contributing to the city, but I’m also in many ways conflicted and desperately always thinking about different ways to heal it and the people within it.”