Are the topics you speak about based on personal experiences? Does art imitate life?

Well I think there is a real exchange there. Everything is so reciprocal. A lot of what I experience personally goes into my art. A lot of things that I write about aren’t necessarily things that I have went through but that I learned about or heard about, or from somebody close to me, politics or whatever. I just make it mines because it makes me feel a certain way. I take the way it makes me feel and what it makes me think about and I put it out there.

When did you realize that writing poetry was what you wanted to do?

When I was in college and I started sharing my work with people. I had written for a long time before that in my journals, but I finally started sharing it with my friends and they were really digging it. They kind of gassed me up, even though they were fully biased since they are my friends (laughs). I really felt something inside, like hey you know, if I were to pursue this, this might be something I could do for life. Whether I make money off of it or not this could be something I do for the rest of my life because it brings me joy, it helps me sort a lot of things out. College is where I decided that I was poet.

What was your first paying performance?

The first time I had a feature at The Zanzibar Blue, which is where I got up and performed my poetry with music in front of people for the very first time. Then they started a weekly feature because so many poets in Philly would come out, so I had a weekly feature that night, and I got like $25 or $50.

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