Brian Sonia-Wallace is an educator, poet, and entrepreneur with 15 years of experience building bridges between people with poetry. The founder of RENT Poet (featured on How I Built This), he has written poems for over 10,000 strangers across the country based on their stories, including in residence for Amtrak Trains, Mall of America, Google, WeHo Pride, and the National Parks. Brian is the author of The Poetry of Strangers (Harper Collins 2020), the 4th Poet Laureate of the City of West Hollywood, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. His work has been published in The Guardian, Rolling Stone and American Poets, and set to music to be sung at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and Kennedy Center. In addition to youth work, he teaches through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.