ABOUT
Chelsea Guevara is a proud U.S.-Salvadoreña who spends her time thinking about culture, language, and birds. She began to write poetry during her senior year of high school, and found it to be a powerful tool to interpret her feelings surrounding her multiracial identity. Since then, Chelsea has continued to write and perform in various art and academic spaces within her local Utah community. In 2020, she competed at the international Women of the World Poetry Slam in Dallas, Texas, and has worked as a poetry coach for local high school students for the last three years. More recently, she is a part of the Kearns High School Slam Poetry Team who recently won the title of 2022 Team State Champions. She continues to focus her writing on the complexity of identity, her own culture and communities, and the perceptions that surround them. You can find her work on Button Poetry and Write About Now Poetry.
Chelsea has obtained a bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah's Latin American Studies program, and Writing & Rhetoric Studies program with a Spanish minor. She continues her journey in higher education in an effort to better serve her Latinx community and other marginalized groups, while also regularly competing in and presenting poetry at local venues. She represented the state of Utah on the stage of the international Woman of the World Poetry Slam competition in March 2020. As a featured poet, she held a virtual workshop the following April for almost 50 high school students for the Utah Annual High School Poetry Slam. She has also taught slam poetry for the Egyptian YouTheatre Bilingual Summer Camp in June 2020 and June 2022, engaging with students of elementary and middle school ages. She is currently a poetry coach for students at Kearns High School, providing mentorship in writing, performance and competition strategy, and also holds writing workshops in Salt Lake County. She hopes that an introduction to slam poetry will help students and adults alike to find stories that make them feel at home, and to become the representation in stories that are important to them.