Gretchen Carvajal is a multidisciplinary artist from the Bay Area and a Poet Mentor in Youth Speaks, heading the Youth Leadership Division. Gretchen is a Youth Speaks Alum and recent graduate from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Under the First Wave Spoken Word and Hip-Hop Arts Scholarship, she studied Studio Art with a focus on Printmaking and Neon while working on her craft as a spoken word artist. You can find her poetry on several publications and online via Button Poetry. She has performed on stages in Chicago, New York, and the Philippines working with artists like Saul Williams, Rafael Casal, and Ruby Ibarra among others. As a 1.5 generation Filipina immigrant, she turned to writing to make sense of her identity. Her mission as an artist is to unravel her Filipino American identity through the combined use of visual and literary arts to create stories that can be universally understood.