Meet the New Jersey City Poet Laureate | Headlight

Melida Rodas, Jersey City’s recent poet laureate, knows the pain and feeling of “not belonging…being on the sidelines.” And she wants to use her words to alleviate the discomfort that marginalized and oppressed communities suffer.

“I wrote about pain (when I was younger), but over time my work has evolved into wanting to reach out to people on the margins and say you are loved,” said Rodas, who came to Bayonne from Bayonne Guatamala as a 7-year-old who couldn’t speak a word of English.

“You are so loved. Once your heart is a little calmer, ask yourself, “How can I pay this forward now?”… I can still write about pain… but it’s more about bringing us together. If someone doesn’t know how to do it, I want to be the one to do it.

Rodas’ two-year appointment was approved by Jersey City Council earlier this month. The role of the poet laureate includes promoting the literary arts and promoting social engagement through poetry.

“When I was given the title, my first reaction was gratitude,” says Rodas. “I started thinking about how I got here and looking back at the work I did in my neighborhood with the children there and the women from the different shelters. My teachers, Ms. (Antoinette) Deluca (and career counselor), Mr. (Charles) Nuziale and (NJCU) Professor (Edvige) Giunta, are three people I cannot thank enough for showing me the right path.”

Giunta wrote the nomination letter for Rodas, punctuating Mayor Steve Fulop’s first inauguration ceremony in 2013 with her poem “There in a City, Our Jersey City.”

“I quickly realized that Melida was not a student who needed an education; She was a rare born writer, one of a kind, and my job as her teacher was to create a space for her to tell her stories,” Giunta wrote. “As she read her work aloud, the class listened intently and seemed effortlessly transported into the world she conjured.”

Rodas says she’s ready to get started and has already received the city’s blessing to hold a Jersey City Poetry Festival in September 2025. And a year before she was chosen as the poet laureate, Rodas advocated for poetry installations in city parks.

“Last year I reached out to Bharka Patel, director of the city’s infrastructure department, and said I would like to see the work of Jersey City’s children and other emerging and established poets in the city’s parks,” said Rodas, a recent graduate of the Jersey City University. “So now (after being named a poet laureate) I said, ‘Bharka, Now Can we carry out the installations in the city parks? “

While Rodas is quick to credit teachers and mentors along the way, her journey began when she and her family arrived in Bayonne in 1979.

“My mother worked in a carpet factory and my father was a dishwasher,” said Rodas, who had two Jersey Journal newspapers as a child. “We were here on a green card, which meant we were on borrowed time.”

She says that there were “moments when I wondered if one of my parents was coming home from work because there were raids on illegal immigrants going on.”

She quickly overcame the language barrier, but growing up in Bayonne in the 1980s she “felt like she didn’t belong. “It makes you a little introverted.” The feeling of not belonging pushes you to the edge.”

“I remember an Irish boy who lived on the same block spitting in my face just because my family wasn’t from here,” she said. “At school, it wasn’t until fourth grade that we had another Latino student, also from Guatemala, where I now thought I had a boyfriend.”

Rodas found solace in books: “We went to the library. The library was my church. At first it’s a lonely place… but then you actually start to embrace it and love that loneliness.”

Rodas, her harshest critic, chose psychology over art as her major after high school. But she was interested in taking creative writing and art courses as an elective, and her teachers took notice. “‘What’s your major?’ they would say. ‘You’re good at it!’”

Rodas does not have a degree in psychology. In fact, it wasn’t until years later that she returned to school and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a teaching degree.

“When I had these things, I was a writer, an artist and a mother,” she said. “I raised my baby. But I came back.”

Rodas has long collaborated with local organizations on creative projects celebrating community and has received numerous awards and accolades, including the Jersey City Woman of Action Award in 2023.

She also helped women create handmade books and poems as part of Ken Mare High School’s partnership with the York Street Project, which serves women from homeless shelters.

“They were the ones who taught me,” Rodas says. “I remember sharing something personal on my first day there because I needed them to see me at my most vulnerable in order to resonate with them. Afterwards, I cried behind the wheel in my car because I couldn’t believe what they were carrying.”

Rodas co-founded Greenville Arts Crossroads, a grassroots poetry and arts organization dedicated to connecting, nurturing and inspiring creative talent in Hudson County.

She says her work is about “elevating other people’s voices.” … My role has always been, “How do we give a voice to people who don’t have a voice?”

Additionally, Rodas has held teaching positions at All Saints Catholic Academy and Saint Peter’s University’s 21st Century Program, an after-school program that teaches art and poetry.

At Infinite Therapy Solutions, based in Bayonne, she currently holds various positions, including Education and Community Engagement Coordinator, where she leads community initiatives dedicated to supporting neurodivergent children.

An excerpt from Melida Rodas’ “Elefante – Mocosita”

A multimedia work that includes memoir, ceramics, poetry, projections, sculpture, intaglios, photography and music:

A kiln is a womb that yields an art object.

As the kiln incubates the mud, a potter can take a look at its interior through a peephole. Everything inside glows the color of amber. A long cooling process must be completed before I can reach in to reveal a finished vessel. Removing it prematurely will cause the stoneware to shatter.

September begins with me in the ceramics studio, an apron tied around my waist. The old shoes I keep for studio work barely make any noise in this huge space.

Where do I start?

I haven’t held the tone for years.

Feels like a distant friend or a song whose lyrics I’ve forgotten but whose melody I still remember.

Memory.

What do I remember?

What do I want to tell you?

How?

I reach into a barrel.

When I edit the sound, I listen to exactly this wet mass from nowhere.

What will it tell me?

How should I translate it?

I am the messenger.

The in-between.

I am here and yet there again.

My childhood…

1977

In the evening we heard the soothing hum of a distant bus, a man jingling tiredly with his keys before entering his house, a cricket, a toad, the whisper of a wind-blown tree, a Guatemalan ballad wafting like incense from a nearby one Flowed out of the window. My dad would come home late again. At that time, my mom tickled me with fairy tales and legends. I asked her to make up stories for me about La Mocosita. “Mocosita” was an elephant that I idolized…