Danny Solis, Albuquerque’s first and only Slam Poet Laureate, is being remembered by friends, family and colleagues. Solis died in his sleep in New York on April 6, at age 63. A cause of death has not yet been determined, according to his family. He won national and international awards for his spoken word poetry and earned the slam poet laureate title in 2009. Though he moved to Minnesota about a decade ago, grief, remembrances and support for his family have poured out from across New Mexico.
Solis told Minnesota arts education organization Compas in 2019 that as a child he began memorizing poems his sisters would read to him. He said he wrote his first poem at five years old while growing up in what he described to Generation Justice’s Lucia Martinez as a political household in Dallas, Texas.
“I know people in radioland can’t see me, but I’m definitely not somebody who’s going to be wearing a cowboy hat,” he said to laughs. Solis wore dreadlocks often tied back in a bandana.
“My dad was a union man, you know, so they were always going to protests,” he said. “And we would go out and protest police brutality and march with La Raza Unida Party and LULAC,” (the League of United Latin American Citizens).
By 17 years old, he was participating in El Movimiento himself, fasting in protest with the Texas Farm Workers Union on the capitol steps in Austin.
“This is something I grew up with and that I’m passing on,” he said. “And it’s one of the things I’m the most proud to pass on.”
He did this through his work teaching youth at the New Mexico Academy for the Media Arts and Youth Diagnostic and Development Center and elsewhere, through work with the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice, and by sitting on the Recuerda a César Chávez Committee— helping organize an annual celebration of the labor organizer and Dolores Huerta. He also passed it on through his poetry.
He performed his poem Chicano for Poetry Matters, an educational project created by New Mexico CultureNet. It starts, “It is times like this when I feel the old blood inside, stirring, heating the new Mexican, Mexicano, Chicano. I am listening to Los Lobos — guitarron and accordion spinning out generations of dignified grief.”
Solis was selected by the U.S. State Department as a cultural envoy to Nepal in 2010, where he helped locals organize poetry slams. Five years earlier, he helped bring the National Poetry Slam to Albuquerque. KUNM volunteer Don McIver co-coordinated that event with him.
“He was a fantastic performer,” McIver said. “He was very very political in a lot of his poems, but he would bring in his own personal feelings and emotions and experiences — and use that as a metaphor to talk about political issues.”
McIver cited Song for Solomon as an example. It’s a poem about Solis’ godson that helped win him the title of Albuquerque Slam Poet Laureate among other awards.
Many described Solis as “larger than life.” McIver said that can evoke mixed memories.
“A lot of people are saying the same things,” he said about social media remembrances he’s seen. “You know — ‘Danny and my relationship was very complicated.’ But also, ‘He made me a better person,' ‘He made me a better performer.’”
Andrea Zoss, Solis’ ex-wife and mother of his son, Teagan, said Solis valued honesty and authenticity and “wore his heart on his sleeve.”
“He’s this intimidating-until-you-know-him kind of poet guy — but he’s so silly,” she said. “Like, a guy who’s just obsessed with dogs.”
She said he was also a “lover of all babies”
“My friend called him a ‘universal father’ — instantly connecting with children,” she said. “And no one more so than our own son, of course.”
When Zoss got a job at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota in 2013, she says there was “no question” for Solis that he’d move from Albuquerque to be near their son, who he had a “single-minded focus to delighting,” she said. “To just making Teagan feel this cocoon of adoration completely surrounding him. That was quintessentially what Danny was.”
Friend and former co-worker Adrien Lawyer said they became fathers around the same time.
“Just all the ups and downs of being a new parent, it felt like a really strong support system we had in each other,” he said. “We were also big football fans, both.”
Danny liked the Dallas Cowboys and, according to Lawyer, all the teams from his hometown.
“If you asked him what was the most important thing he did in his life, it would definitely have been being a dad to Teagan,” said Lawyer.
Solis told Generation Justice that he’d sit his son in his lap with toys and snacks during Recuerda a César Chávez Committee meetings when he was just a toddler.
“But he was in that environment where people were conscious of César’s and Delores’ legacy, and the legacy of human rights and civil rights that they’ve dedicated their lives to,” Solis said in 2011. “And nothing could make me prouder than to know that I was involving him, even at a young age when he really didn’t know what was going on — but some of it was sinking in.”
Lawyer started an online fundraiser to meet Solis’ end-of-life expenses and to support Zoss and their son.
“It was something I could do to help as they’re trying to navigate this incredibly difficult time that also has a ton of logistical problems,” he said.
The fundraiser surpassed its $15,000 goal in just days with the help of around 300 donations and counting.
“You can see that he was a part of a lot of different worlds and that anywhere that he had a footprint, it was huge,” Lawyer said of looking at the list of donors.
Some of Solis’ most recent social media posts were about his unfinished first novel, Flowers of the Desert. Zoss said, after five years of writing, he had finished it just a few months ago and was looking for an agent. There’s no telling what was to come for Danny Solis, but it’s clear he leaves behind a legacy of passion and service — as a writer, teacher, activist and father.
