"I was an English major in school. When I left Moorehouse I came to the Bay Area on a teaching fellowship and was able to interact with my students not just on the level of literature but particularly creating one's own literature and sharing it and performing it. So I started as a poet in '98, and you know its just been developing as I've developing you know what I mean like as I feel like as artists as we get open for ourselves and to ourselves our work reflects it, so that's, that's the process I guess. And that really is the work, is the process you know what I mean."

"My greatest wish is for people to shift in degrees less in their opinion than in their emotional stance towards whatever it is that I'm talking about. I just don't want folks to remain neutral, to hear me and stay neutral, if I don't move who I'm speaking to than I'm not really communicating what I want to. That's what I hope for in my work, that it reaches people's ears and they honestly confront what I'm saying and change in some way by that."

"Spoken word in the Bay Area more than in any other place in the country is supported, is prolific, is dynamic, is political, and has more relevancy here than anywhere else in the country. I think that a large part of the catalyst for that is the amount of attention that young people are paying to themselves, to the lyricism in popular culture, in hip-hop culture and the way they are reacting to it. They are creating music but also expanding upon and creating a new form of lyricism, and I think it trickles up rather than trickling down. The youth get inspired by their mentors and by their educators but we in turn see the force with which young people are coming with their words and it just pushes the whole form forward."

"I came to the Bay Area to teach and got linked up with my students and for most places that I wanted to take my students to just made me feel uncomfortable. If they were as stale as some museums or as illegal as hip-hop clubs there really wasn't any place where I could go with my students. La Peña was the first place where I could watch performances and really watch conscious hip-hop and soul music and was my first exposure to spoken word, was here with my students."

"Since that time I've performed as part of the Collective Soul series, the Word Descarga series, with Youth Speaks as part of their teen poetry slam, and I've been super blessed because La Peña is commissioning my first evening length work along with the National Performance Network. So I've gone from a teacher just bringing his kids here to an artist in residence in about five years and that's how my relationship with La Peña has been and will be."

Photo by Hugh Lovell