Adoyele Nzinga, also known as "WordSlanger", is a playwright, director, poet, educator and activist, and the first poet laureate of the city of Oakland, California.
Nzinga was born in the 1950s, and is unsure of her birthplace.
She attended Laney College where she started directing theater under Marvin X. She earned a MFA in Writing and Consciousness from the New College of California and a Ph.D. in Transformative Education & Change from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
In 1999, she founded the Lower Bottom Playaz theater troupe. They were first hosted at the Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater, and starting in 2023 at BAM House, an art center for African-American arts. They became the first troupe to stage August Wilson's American Century Cycle in chronological order.
In 2021, she became Oakland's first Poet Laureate for a term of two years.