SAN DIEGO — She was already a poet, she just didn’t realize it. Sunny Rey Azzarito was in the fourth grade and struggling a bit in school when her teacher looked at one of her assignments and saw creativity where someone else may have chosen criticism.

“I have audio processing disorder, so it’s kind of like a cousin of dyslexia, and it makes processing big chunks of information extra challenging. When I was in fourth grade, I started putting my homework in fragmented sentences. It was really just the way I was processing them and how I wanted to express my answers. It’d be a little half of a sentence, then the next sentence was half of a sentence, instead of in paragraph,” she says. “My teacher pulled me aside after school and said, ‘Sunny, I just wanted to say how amazing that you turned in your history assignment in poetry,’ and that I went above and beyond. I was like, ‘What is poetry?’ I had no idea at all. I’d been very unsuccessful in school, going through speech therapy, I was bouncing off the walls and, like, feral. I had no idea what she was talking about, but she spent the next week showing me Shel Silverstein and poetry, and I loved it. It felt like it was such a cool way that I could finish sentences and thoughts without a bunch of red marks all over my pages.”

That kind of focus affirmed her in a way that gave her a lifeline at that time in her young life, one with a history with homelessness and going through foster care and adoption. Poetry helped her survive and develop into a writer who’s authored three volumes of poetry and founded Poets Underground, an organization in which one part is a nonprofit with events, workshops, and outreach programs, and the other is a limited liability corporation providing media, publishing, and writing services. One of the events they’re getting ready for is their Chula Vista Slam Fest, a one-day poetry slam festival and competition funded through a performing and visual arts grant from the City of Chula Vista. The event features local poets and performances on April 25 at the Memorial Bowl Amphitheater in Chula Vista’s Memorial Park.

Azzarito lives in Carlsbad with her husband, Anthony, and their blended family of five children. Anthony Azzarito is also a poet, and they own and operate Poets Underground as a duo. She took some time to talk about how they first met at a poetry event, how writing and performing gave her an outlet and a voice, and why she has such a strong desire to help other people find healing through poetry.

Q: Tell us about Poets Underground.

A: Before I met Anthony, I was just a really overworked single parent who always worked multiple jobs in social work. I found myself suddenly not employed for the first time in mid-2019, and a friend called me to go Amplified, a brewery in the East Village, because his friend was gutting out the basement to make a speakeasy and was talking about having a poetry night during their launch. He said I should be the featured poet; at this point, I’d been a writer for 10 years and had two volumes of poetry published through Garden Oak Press. I had my own little events and stuff for my books, but that was more like passive income in the background. I was so happy that he thought of me for poetry, and I went down to the space and it was the dopest space I’d ever seen. It was called the Acid Vault, it had an art installation, it was just a crazy, trippy space. I was a workaholic looking for identity all over again and was just bewildered with what to do with my free time, so I asked if it could be a weekly thing. The owner’s like, “You think people are going to come to an open mic for poetry weekly and make it enough to pay my staff to open the doors?” I did, and I said to give me three months and I would find every amazing poet in town I could think of to headline for the first three months. I figured the audience would get so enthralled and create such community that they would become the next round of headliners, which is exactly what happened. It became extremely successful, it was always packed out, and we had people in the hallways. We called it Poets Underground because it was literally poets meeting underground in this basement. Before starting Poets Underground, I was a director at a homeless shelter and I wanted to bring in what I knew to be healing from the work I’d been doing. I had experienced so much trauma in open mic spaces where I would go up and share something incredibly personal and vulnerable and gut-wrenching, and then maybe get a snap or two, and you move on to the next person called to the stage. You don’t really know how it was received or if it landed well at all. I thought it was such a missed opportunity to spend a minute and reflect back to the person who shared that you heard them, to spend time on the feedback, like I did in case management with the youth at the shelter.

What I love about Carlsbad…

Beside the proximity to the beach, I just love the vibe of the people. It’s very different than other beach neighborhoods that can be super pretentious. It’s very family oriented. I really like being close to Oceanside, which has an edgier art scene, and we get to be close to our friends.

Q: Why was this something you wanted to do?

A: For me, especially, I was an angsty teenager writing poetry early on while processing huge events that had happened my life—sexual trauma, being adopted, being on my own at 16, just the intensity of intersections that were happening for me. I was a high school dropout and had to work really early on, and open mics held me through that at places like Lestat’s that were consistent; no matter what year, it’s always happening on a Wednesday, it’s always there at nine o’clock until 12. You have familiar faces, you have community, you guys are talking about something real, you’re getting past the small talk and just skipping to the part that acknowledges that we’re alive and being alive is really hard. Talking about that was always just a survival necessity for me. Now, I was at this place as a single parent—not working, looking for a refreshed identity—and having the opportunity to create that in a way to really run with the opportunity of getting a bunch of people together who brought a little poem to share in a dark room to a crowd of strangers. There’s something happening with each individual who felt called to do that; they want to be seen and they want to see other people. So, I thought this was an amazing opportunity to really move into that.

Q: On your website, you mention navigating homelessness, foster care, and adoption when you were young. Are you comfortable talking a bit about how you grew up?

A: For sure, it’s a big part of my life. My birth mom, the story is that she ran away at 15 after experiencing sexual abuse from my grandmother’s different boyfriends. I imagine my mom has a similar story to a lot of people that are experiencing houselessness today, where they’ve just decided that the world in which they lived was so unsafe that they ran away from it. They would rather be completely alone than to trust another person again, or to risk being harmed. So, my mom did that at 15. She ended up having six kids and I’m the second of the six. My sister was maybe 18 months older than me, and when my mom was pregnant with me, she left my sister on the side of the road. She was found by a truck driver and lived with my grandmother full time until my grandmother passed away of liver disease. Since my mom had that on her record and had been spending some time in jail while pregnant with me, as soon as she hitchhiked and found herself in San Diego going into labor, I immediately was taken away from her and went into the foster care system. My adoptive parents had interactions with me pretty early on, but my birth mother had up to three years to “get herself together” to be able to parent a child. She never did, so I’d go back and forth from court to my adopted parents. During those times, I didn’t know if she was going to be able to regain custody. Sadly, that didn’t happen, and to my knowledge, she is still homeless today. I am one of my only siblings that hasn’t experienced homelessness in adulthood, or incarceration. Since this is my family, my understanding early on was to find healing.

There’s definitely a level of urgency and desperation when I work with people because I feel like everything could be that opportunity, that turning point. Everyone could wake up in their lives right now and start to acknowledge things that have happened to them, but to get healing and to be seen and to be validated at the other end of it, wow. But healing takes place when somebody just being believed. I worked for a few years with an organization in Riverside doing homeless outreach. When you work with organizations, they’re focused on outcomes because that’s how they get funding. With Poets Underground, my only outcome is to hear from you and to validate your experience. To give you space to make art and to celebrate you. For them to have an experience where there’s something on the other end of it besides brokenness; it’s, somehow, put together on a page and they get to experience an applause.

Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?

A: Never defend yourself because your enemies won’t believe you anyway, and your friends don’t need it.

Q: What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you?

A: I think people who meet us in our extremely inclusive and open community, would be pretty surprised to learn that I have a very strong faith with Christ, but I actually believe that the two coexist perfectly. It’s my driving force behind wanting to connect and heal and bring restoration to this planet. I think people that have a certain like idea of what a Christian might look like would be surprised that we march in the gay pride parade. Our community is completely inclusive and validating.

Q: Please describe your ideal San Diego weekend.

A: Maybe it would start off strolling around Balboa Park, getting some food or coffee in North Park, heading over to Sunset Cliffs. Finding one of our favorite farmers markets—depending on what day I’m in Little Italy or perusing around Carlsbad—and then ending the day at home, grateful that we were able to live here and be here because I don’t know what I would do without this city.

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