Desireé Dallagiacomo

Desireé Dallagiacomo (she/her) is a writer, educator, and space creator. She is of Chahta and European descent, and is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is the author of SINK (Button Poetry, 2019) and the founder of The Heart of It Writing Retreat.

Des is a sister, auntie, daughter, teaching artist, poet, and lifelong student of community raised in the foothills of Northern California and the swamplands of South Louisiana.

She teaches poetry & creative writing in public schools, private schools, and on the internet. She began teaching in public schools 14 years ago with the youth spoken word organization WordPlay (now housed within Humanities Amped) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Previously the program and artistic director for the largest youth spoken word organization in Louisiana, she is now a freelance teaching artist and an adjunct creative writing teacher at Baton Rouge Magnet High School.

In 2016, she founded The Heart of It, an intimate and intensive writing retreat for poets and writers of marginalized genders. It started as a small passion project and has become a vibrant network of writers from all over the United States. Applications open in late summer, and the retreat takes place on the Mendocino Coast.

A gender and abolitionist scholar, Desireé began writing as a young teenager exchanging weekly letters with her incarcerated brother, housed in a maximum security prison in California. In the years that followed, she started sharing her work on open mics, in poetry slams, and in community writing workshops in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She has been a finalist at every major poetry slam in the United States and her work has been featured in The New York Times, Everyday Feminism, and Bustle Magazine among others. A member of many poetry slam teams in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, she went on to coach youth and adult poetry slam teams, and in 2017 she coached the Baton Rouge youth poetry slam team to an international championship at the largest youth poetry slam festival in the world, Brave New Voices.

Desireé spent many years teaching, organizing, and building spoken word curriculum and community alongside writers and scholars from the deep south and beyond, where she also developed her writing practice. It is with that mentorship and knowledge that she strives to create communities of belonging through poetry and writing pedagogy with particular interest in working class and impoverished writers of marginalized genders.

Desireé dropped out of the University of New Orleans to become a poet, and at 32 years old, she returned to school to complete her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she is a student in the VAST program (Visualizing Abolition Studies) and a Feminist Studies major.

Currently, Des leads a weekly writing workshop, stewards The Heart of It Writing Retreat, teaches at Baton Rouge Magnet High, and is writing her second full-length collection of poetry.

She is a Helen Zell fellow and an MFA candidate in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor).

If you want to read her current work, subscribe to her substack.