Ratchetdemic, Poet, Abolitionist & Educator,
Dr. Teruko Dobashi
Teruko is a Black, queer educator and poet from Hunters Point in San Francisco. She’s a former foster youth who was told she’d only make it out in a body bag or in shackles—and decided early she wasn’t going to let that be her ending.
As a teenager, she was featured on HBO’s Brave New Voices through Youth Speaks—writing about what it meant to be young, loud, Black, and often underestimated in a community navigating its own weight. The stage didn’t give her a voice—it gave her a place to use it.
At the University of California, Berkeley, she deepened that work—supporting Oakland youth through restorative practices, facilitating poetry workshops at Berkeley High School, and holding circles in West Oakland. She later made the final five-person team for CALSLAM, UC Berkeley’s poetry slam team, competing alongside some of the strongest collegiate poets in the country.
She spent five years in Jackson, Mississippi, where her work expanded across classrooms and communities—joining Black Youth Project 100, facilitating literacy-as-abolition workshops for system-impacted youth in New Orleans, and building an after-school program rooted in social justice and community care. Across every school she has worked in, Teruko has led poetry clubs—creating spaces for young people to write, speak, and be heard on their own terms.
Teruko holds a Master of Social Work from Jackson State University, a Master of Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a Doctorate in Educational Leadership from Georgia State University. Her dissertation, Black on Black School Discipline: Double Consciousness and the Perspectives of Disciplining Your Own, is an arts-based phenomenological study that weaves Kwansabas and original poetry to illuminate its findings—and earned Manuscript of the Year.
On the mic, she has won the Performance Award at The Circle in Atlanta, along with competitions at My Sister’s Room and Apache Café. But her work has never just been about performance—it’s about truth-telling, reflection, and pushing against the systems that shape how we see ourselves and each other.
Teruko writes, teaches, and leads from a place that doesn’t ask for permission. Her work lives at the intersection of education, liberation, and storytelling—making space for voices that are often labeled too much, too loud, or too real.
#Ratchetdemic.