about
Zoe Dorado is a Pinay poet, journalist, & musician from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a 2023 U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, a 2023 National YoungArts Finalist in Writing (Spoken Word), winner of the Amanda Gorman Future Voices Poetry Scholarship, & the 2023 Youth Speaks Teen Poetry Slam Champion. From 2021-2022, she served as the Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of Alameda County & is the runner-up for the 2024 U.S. National Youth Poet Laureate. She currently serves as the Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador for the Western U.S.
As a writer, she has collaborated with healthcare workers at the SEIU-UHW labor union, gun reform advocates at Brady United, scientists at the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, and formerly incarcerated women at the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) to humanize public health & policy issues through poetry & journalism.
Her literary work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Offing, Bullshit Lit, Frontier Poetry, & the Haymarket AAPI Poetry Anthology edited by Franny Choi, Terisa Siagatonu, No'u Revilla, & Bao Phi. She is a Poetry Editor for The Adroit Journal and on the Editorial team for The Fire Inside, a project initiated by people inside California women’s prisons in collaboration with former prisoners & advocates on the outside.
As a drummer, Zoe has performed in ensembles with the California Jazz Conservatory, the Stanford Jazz Workshop, the pop-rock band Peaboo & the Catz, & with rap artist Ruby Ibarra at the SF MOMA & Yerba Buena Gardens. She has been a teaching artist for the Filipinx Girls Rock Camp Sampaguita Rock & a private drum educator for youth.
She is currently a student at Pomona College in Southern California.