Michelle Tarshus, whose pen name is Signature MiMi, will serve as Portland’s poet laureate through 2027. Sofia Aldinio/Staff Photographer

As Portland welcomes its next poet laureate, the city is also introducing a new honorary post: youth poet laureate.

The Portland Public Library, which oversees the positions, has named Michelle Tarshus, whose pen name is Signature MiMi, as the city’s eighth poet laureate and 17-year-old Yashaswini (Yashu) Derisala its first youth poet laureate. Both poets immigrated to the United States as children and write about their experiences with discrimination and their resilience in the face of it.

And both have big plans for the Portland community.

The pair will be inaugurated into the volunteer roles in September. Tarshus, who moved to Portland in 2018, will serve until 2027, and Derisala, a rising senior at Scarborough High School, will hold the position for a year. The library accepts applicants who have lived in Greater Portland for at least a year.

With the support of library staff, Tarshus, who uses she/siya/they pronouns, wants to put on a music and poetry series for incarcerated women, lead poetry nature walks and host open mics, according to her application.

The self-described “poetic being and creative expressionista” has a background in sharing poetry with the community. When she’s not writing or performing her poetry, Tarshus is the “yin half” of Signature Soul, a spoken word duo with Marco Soulo, her partner. Together, they create “a fusion of rhythm, rhyme, reason and resonance” in their spoken word performances, according to their website.

In 2013, the pair launched the Creative Expression Initiative, a workshop series that includes open mics, outdoor adventures and retreats, creating spaces for “freestyling, jamming, visioning and just being.” For the past two years, they have hosted Creatives Gathering – an “artist-to-artist” open mic featuring a range of mediums – at Mechanics’ Hall on the third Wednesday of every month.

“Open mics are my love language,” Tarshus said. “I think there’s something so powerful when communities are able to take moments to share things that are on their hearts and on their minds.” Tarshus said there will be many more open mics during her tenure as poet laureate.

Yashaswini (Yashu) Derisala, 17, is Portland’s first youth poet laureate. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

Derisala was born in southern India and spent a portion of her childhood there. In her application and in early conversations with the library, Derisala said she wants to host a welcome event with Port Veritas, a nonprofit that hosts open mic nights, to encourage people from marginalized communities to create poetry, and she plans to lead workshops for young people.

“I hope to always leave a legacy of love,” she said.

For two years, Derisala participated in a poetry workshop at school with Maya Williams, the outgoing poet laureate, in which she contributed to class chapbooks “(Redacted for Monetary Reasons)” and “Born But Not Alive.”

“Yashu is so incredible with her use of language,” Williams said. “She is very intentional with her peers, so I am very excited to see how she’s going to engage young people.”

Williams described Derisala’s style as visceral and honest. Derisala said she finds poetic inspiration in her experiences of “racial identity, cultural joy, colonialism, imposter syndrome, self-reflection and the healing of the soul” and likes writing in free verse because it feels like a diary.

Sarah Skawinski, associate director of the Portland Public Library, said that Tarshus was chosen out of 15 candidates, because she offers a “fresh and new voice for Portland.”

Tarshus, 33, was born in Angeles City, Central Luzon in the Philippines and moved to the U.S. when she was 4. She said her “heart is spread across the ocean,” so she grounds a lot of her poetry in her experience growing up as a multiethnic person in America. For example, her pieces “SANCTIFIED” and “LUMPIA AND LISTENING” draw on themes of colonization, resilience, community and heritage.

She said that the region of the Philippines that she descends from – the Visayas – is known for its poets. “I’m tuning into that blood and heritage,” she said.

Tarshus experiments with rhythm and form, both in spoken word and on the page. In 2014, she released her first EP, “Only Poetry Could Have Brought Me Here,” which features seven tracks of her urgent lyrics backed by piano.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, a former Portland poet laureate and the executive director of Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, has watched Tarshus perform many times, and he’s impressed by her ability to “bounce back and forth between what we might consider a traditional poem and a song and a performance piece.”

“It’s all swirling in her work,” he said.