For me, church was about not only religion but about community. A woman in my grandmother's church helped pay for my SAT classes when I was in high school and drove me there every week.
I read this book when I was young. It's about a black girl growing up in Heaven, Ohio. The cover has a black girl with clouds behind her. It was the first book cover I ever saw with a girl that looked like me.
They say Chicago is for haters. No one will just sweat each other and say, 'Oh, you're so good,' if you're not. Which is another reason I'm inspired to stay.
I started writing poems on a Xanga page. I always loved writing. I also had a Deviant Art page, actually, because my crush had one, too.
When I was a kid, getting on Lake Shore Drive from the south side to go downtown was magical.
I wish that more people, especially young people, were taught about self-love at a younger age.
Hairdressers are all-knowing. They're so wise.
It's important to me that there's not just one story told about our city. 'LSD' is an ode to Chicago, a song for the complicated love I have for my city.
There is a lot of history buried in Chicago that I still have yet to discover.
I like to borrow forms and quotes and use a lot of allusions, in both poetry and music.
I always loved singing because I grew up in a very musical family. My mom wasn't able to do music professionally because her parents wanted her to get a 'real job,' but she played guitar.
I spent a lot time with my siblings because there weren't too many young people on our block. We were our own best friends: making dances to a Stevie Wonder songs and singing with my mom.
Naming something, putting it on record, in a lyric, feels like affirming people. Ideally, that's what politicians should want to do: to put laws or policies in place that speak to people's experiences, to make them feel heard.
I really liked 'Blk Girl Art.' It's like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it's poetry or music.
The lake was always my orienting point when my dad was teaching me how to not get lost. The lake is east, so you'll always know that. It's a weird thing where you can kind of feel where you're at in Chicago, and when I was downtown, I was like, 'Oh, it feels more open over here. That must be east.' It felt like a little secret thing.
My artistic manifesto exists in the world as poetry. So even though most of the things that I've done have been on other people's projects or could be pigeonholed in certain ways, that's not how I perceive myself.
A lot of people get Chicago wrong. I've developed this protective feeling about how we're portrayed, and at the same time, I'm acutely aware of the issues we face and the root causes of these issues.
I don't know if it's because I grew up in Beverly or my friends, but I listened to a lot of alternative rock music. I loved Incubus, Weezer and Jimmy Eat World. It almost felt segregated because I loved all of those acts over here, but then I also loved R&B and soul music I grew up with.
When I started writing poetry, it was always in very hip-hop influenced spaces: Someone would teach a Nas song side-by-side with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and we'd talk about the connections between those things.
I read 'Song of Solomon' by Toni Morrison in college, and it just blew my mind.
