I was supposed to be a painter.
Stranded in the suburbs of New Jersey, I was a mixed-race kid too White for the Black kids and too Black for everyone else. The only way I knew to make sense of the world around me was through art. Well, art and music–music, more than anything, helped me survive long enough to, well, to become myself. But I’ve never been a singer, though, and I could never quite get the hang of guitar or keyboards, so I stuck with the art.
I thought, for all my childhood, that I would go on to become some deep, intense painter, with works hanging in galleries and museums, things that challenged people’s minds and eyes. Growing up, I did not think I could do anything else–not that I was drawn so much to painting as I felt I was not capable of doing other things.
After high school, I went to art school. Technically, I went to Rutgers University, the state school of New Jersey, and to Mason Gross, the school of the arts. I started school as The Gulf War ended and led to The Rodney King Riots, and both events pushed me to spend less time on my studies and more in the streets, organizing and learning. Ona whim I took an acting class and a writing class, and found, to my immense shock, that I was actually able to do other things besides paint.
And then a friend lent me his copy of E. Katz’s Space and Other Poems For Love, Laughs, and Social Transformation, and it all changed. When I picked up the book, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a painter; when I put it down, I knew I was a poet.
I left college, spent my time organizing protests, running workshops, and screaming poems into the world.
When I see people doing “90’s” theme parties, I figure they’re either too young to really remember them or they were living a very different life than the one I knew. But the one thing the 90’s had that we don’t today was an ever-present open mic scene, when poetry slams slipped from NYC to the rest of the world, and there seemed like there was some reading or event every night. It was the best school that I could have had, performing in front of political crowds who cheered every word or academic groups who were frightened at the sight of me.
Eventually, I made it to Philly, went back to college, fell in love, got married (hi Christy!), and went on to grad school.
At this point, I had shifted to working on fiction and creative non-fiction, but as my kids got older (hey Thalie! hey Elio!), their fascination with poetry pulled me back.
Poetry was the only way I could begin to explain to them what it is to be Black, to be mixed, in America, and what we really are saying when we say Black Lives Matter.
Those poems led to my first book, and on to this website and so much more.
Trying to make sense of my childhood led to my second book, and who knows what will come next.
I never made it as a painter, and these days my teaching is done mainly in classrooms not streets, but the art is there, and the life is good, and there’s really not much more I could have asked for, to be honest.
