Paolo Javier is a Filipino-born New York poet and artist whose work moves across poetry, comics, sound, visual art, performance, film, and collaborative media. He served as Queens Borough Poet Laureate from 2010 to 2014 and is the author of books including O.B.B., Court of the Dragon, The Feeling Is Actual, and True Account of Talking to the 7 in Sunnyside.
Javier belongs among contemporary poets whose practice expands the page through multiple artistic forms. His work draws on Pilipinx history, migration, popular culture, experimental typography, comics, music, and the languages of Queens.
O.B.B.
Nightboat Books published O.B.B. in 2021. The book develops the figure of the “Original Brown Boy” through poetry, comics, visual art, cultural history, and manifesto-like sequences. Javier began the project years earlier and shaped it through collaborations with artists including Alex Tarampi and Ernest Concepcion.
The book engages Pilipinx komiks, political cartoons, weird fiction, experimental poetry, and the legacy of concrete and visual writing. Its pages move between text and image in ways that make reading a spatial as well as verbal experience.
Court of the Dragon
Court of the Dragon, published by Nightboat Books in 2015, extends Javier’s interest in collage, multilingual language, cinema, sound, and historical memory. The book’s shifting registers reflect a life lived across the Philippines, North America, and the Middle East before Javier settled in Queens.
Its formal range places Javier within a broad tradition of experimental poetry where quotation, fragmentation, typography, and cultural reference become structural elements.
True Account of Talking to the 7 in Sunnyside
Roof Books published True Account of Talking to the 7 in Sunnyside in 2022. The book brings Javier’s hybrid practice into close contact with Queens, neighborhood life, paraliterary forms, performance, and the cultural mixture of New York City.
Queens has remained central to Javier’s public literary work. He has curated readings, edited independent poetry publications, collaborated with artists, and served the borough as poet laureate.
Sound poetry and performance
Javier has produced multiple albums of sound poetry with Listening Center, the project of musician David Mason. Works including Maybe the Sweet Honey Pours combine voice, electronic sound, tape-based textures, and printed text.
His collaborations extend into film and performance. Filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs drew on Javier’s work for Starfish Aorta Colossus and later collaborated with him on SWERVE. These projects make sound, rhythm, visual sequence, and spoken language central parts of Javier’s poetics.
Readers interested in the acoustic dimension of poetry can continue through the guide to sound devices in poetry.
Queens, migration, and diaspora
Javier was born in the Philippines and grew up in several places, including Metro Manila, New York, Cairo, and Greater Vancouver. He later settled in Queens, where the borough’s multilingual and immigrant cultures became part of the social landscape surrounding his work.
His poetry can be read within a larger field of immigrant poetry shaped by movement between languages, countries, memories, and cultural forms.
Awards and public life
Javier has received support from organizations including the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. His visual and literary work has appeared in major New York exhibitions, including Greater New York and Queens International.
He continues to live in Jackson Heights, Queens, and remains active across poetry, visual art, performance, and community literary work.
Further reading
For related writers and traditions, browse the poets directory and the overview of American poetry.