Yordani Rodriguez was born in Santiago, Dominican Republic and has lived in Brooklyn, New York since he was nine years old. He participated in Columbia University’s Freedom & Citizenship program the summer of 2023 and graduated from Thomas A. Edison CTE High School in 2024. His favorite reading in F&C was W.E.B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and “A Talk to Teachers” by James Baldwin. He currently attends Columbia University and plans to major in English and American Studies. In his free time he enjoys writing and performing spoken word poetry and walking across the city.