Founder & Interim Principal Steward · Founding National, EE-NAT-000001
DaJuan Marquis Carter-Woodard is a Bay Area–based poet, author, educator, and publisher whose work centers on knowledge, culture, family, and legacy. He spent more than fifteen years with the Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland, a community of artists, activists, and educators that shaped his commitment to cultural preservation and to building institutions that serve the people around them.
He is the author of Fathering Backwards, published under The Erudition Enclave & Carter-Woodard Publishing — the work in which the Enclave first appears publicly as a private educational and cultural institution. His broader work as a poet, author, and speaker runs through the same themes the Enclave is built on: education beyond schooling, emotional intelligence, creation over consumption, and the transmission of knowledge across generations.
The Enclave began with a simple observation: too much of what matters in life is learned only after the lessons become expensive — contracts after signing the wrong one, credit after damaging it, law after entering a courtroom, parenting while already responsible for a child. The founding question was whether the next generation could be spared starting from zero.
The Founder presently exercises the Enclave’s interim administrative offices during the founding period. Under the Enclave’s doctrine the title of Founder is a permanent part of the historical record and does not transfer; future leaders succeed to the office of Principal Steward rather than to the title of Founder. See Succession & Continuity.