Shandela Contreras

Shandela Contreras is a Los Angeles-based poet, writer, artivist, and teaching artist. She’s the author of Cricket in the Slit of a Tummy (Bottlecap Press, 2025), Every Beautiful Pen Bleeds Through (2024) and Mellow Ballads, that move your bones (2021), and served as a California & Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador. Her work has been featured at events with the Grammy-winning LA Master Chorale at Walt Disney Concert Hall, LA Times Festival of Books, the 2022 Brotherhood Crusade Gala honoring Dodger’s Mookie Betts, and Lincoln Center’s Anthem to Us Project, and many more events. Her writing and poems have been featured in PopMatters, NPR Morning Edition and Taylor & Francis Co. publication. She was selected as one of eight to represent the City of Los Angeles in Paris for the 2024 Cultural Olympic Games. She is a firm believer that the voices of the past shape those of the future.