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Literary Notes

She Left Her ❤ in Oakland

     Chinaka Hodge wrote her first poem at 4 years old. The 27-year-old Oakland native says, “My dad used to give me a writing journal every year … After I got home and did my homework, before I could watch TV, I had to journal for half an hour. And I hated it … it always felt like a chore or a task.”
      But by the time she was 13, writing no longer was a chore, but became a joy.  
      “In the ninth grade, Youth Speaks [a Bay Area spoken word institution] came into my classroom at Berkeley High. I was going through some really serious family drama and I wrote the first poem that I cared deeply about and from then I was hooked as a means of catharsis, as a way of communicating with my peers, as a way of talking about the family things that were going on.”
     Since then, Hodge has tackled writing styles from poetry to playwriting to nonfiction to music reviews to screenplays.
She’s the author of one collection of poetry, For Girls With Hips, published when she was just 22, writes for The Believer and has collaborated with fellow Oaklander Marc Bamuthi Joseph on a number of dramatic works. And she still somehow has time to be in a rap group, write a blog series for Oaklandish and pursue her MFA at the University of Southern California in writing for film and television. Hodge spends much of her time in Los Angeles now.
     “I miss Oakland like crazy — the culture, diversity, the activism, the art …,” she says. “All I write about these days is Oakland. Mirrors in Every Corner [her debut solo play, produced in 2010] was all about Oakland. The next play was about a fictionalized East Oakland.”
     Her broad body of work has already earned the under-30 author kudos from all directions. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that Mirrors in Every Corner “shines with particular brilliance.” And despite her success, Hodge is definitely coming back to Oakland. “My heart is there,” she says.