How to Harness Poetry and Hope for Events and Life
Hello, readers! We are always seeking new ways to share ideas and strategies with change-making event hosts and others who care about cultivating meaningful events and conversations. As a part of this new focus, we planned a series of virtual presentations and conversations with some of the speakers and authors in our network about timely topics. Our conversation with award-winning poets and authors Gloria Muñoz and Tony Keith Jr., PhD, last week was too insightful not to share broadly! We think there is a lot wisdom here for new writers, those trying to get published, non-profit leaders, and anyone looking to discover and cultivate their voice. Enjoy!
Cultivating Your Voice: a conversation with Gloria Muñoz and Tony Keith Jr.
[This conversation was recorded on November 6, 2025. The responses have been edited slightly for length and clarity.]
Katharyn, PLM: We’re going to walk through a series of questions about cultivating voice with Gloria and Tony. They’re going to dialogue about their responses and how they would approach these topics. So, let’s go ahead and get to the first question:
PLM: Start at the beginning. You’re both award-winning poets, authors, and entrepreneurs now, but how did you first discover your voice, and what advice do you have for someone who feels like they have yet to discover their voice?
Gloria: I feel like we’re always discovering our voices, and I talk to students about this, because sometimes they’ll be like, I don’t know, like, I’m trying to find my voice, and I’m like, it’s such an ongoing process, right? So, when I feel most connected my early self, I think it was parties at night with family. I’m Colombian and my family would party and stay up, and then the parents would kind of sit around and tell jokes or declare in Spanish—it’s called declamando—like, you’re declaring a poem. And they would declare these poems, and with, even though it was very late at night, so much enthusiasm and passion and excitement and there was so much power in their words, and I think, for me, that was when the spark of poetry and of storytelling really began to become something and began to ask questions about writing and “how do you do this?”. How do you say something and, like, really own what you’re saying?
I started writing in college, and started learning about authors, and couldn’t believe that people do this. I was so excited, and after that, I just had to figure out.
I’m still figuring out how my voice as a writer will continue to change and grow.
Tony: I love to hear you tell stories! I think that my story would be relatively the same because I think so much about just being a little kid—I write about this in my first book, How the Boogeyman Became a Poet—about being, like, a kid in third grade, doing my very first creative writing assignment… My teacher had asked me to write a poem, and I write a poem about the seasons and, you know, it goes really, really well, and she puts the poem outside of her classroom door. You know, to be a kid, and your poem is outside of the classroom! I felt really confident then, and so what happened right after that is she asked me if I would then be the MC for one of our upcoming school assemblies.
I remember third grade specifically. I don’t know why there’s something about the third grade, but I remember at that point learning that I had this written voice, like, this thing that I can put into handwritten text—because this is the 80s, right? My voice is there, but there’s also this thing that comes out of my mouth. So there’s, like, this auditory voice, and then there’s, like, this visual (written voice).
I remember reading books as a kid, and I did not read, by the way, audience out there, I did not enjoy reading as a kid. (That’s probably a conversation for another day.) What I did enjoy reading were poetry collections, and I would read lots of Black poets: Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, so many others… And I had this moment when I realized ‘I’m reading their poems, and I can kind of hear their voices, although I’ve never heard their voices,’ if that makes sense. And so there was this moment when I was like, oh, as I’m reading, there’s a voice. And so, for me, it started there, and I think that’s just been carrying me through forever. It’s sort of like, yo, I want to find a microphone, I want to find a poem, I want to find a way of expressing this thing that is literally living in me, you know?
PLM: I’d like to continue where you’ve started the conversation. Can you tell us a little bit more about the journey for each of you as an author? Did writing or entrepreneurship come first and how does the voice you cultivate differ between your creative self and your professional self?
Tony: First, I have to share that most of my professional background is in education, but I’ve never been a classroom teacher, right? I have worked in higher education as a college administrator and taught a couple of courses at the college level, but a lot of my professional experience has been working for, like, community-based organizations, nonprofits, after-school programs, tutoring programs.
On the side, my other forms of earning money, right, was I was always performing poetry or being featured somewhere, or doing some consulting. People would say, “Hey, Tony. We’re trying to, you know, get our students engaged, and is there a poetic way we can do this, or can you talk to us about hip-hop?” So my poetry and the consulting stuff was always, like, the side gig.
Spring of 2019, I get laid off from a full-time nonprofit job here in my hometown of DC. My whole team, we all get laid off. And it’s a terrible time, because I’m in the middle of writing my dissertation. A month after I get laid off, my husband got laid off as well. And so there was this point in 2019, where the only way that I knew how to survive was the side hustle. Poetry was the side gig, right? And so I made the side gig the full-time gig.
And so I started hitting up friends, and people who I knew within my network asking, “hey, you know, are you looking for featured artists? Or can I help you help solve a problem in education using this particular perspective?” So I started offering my services to people full-time. And then I started applying for fellowships, artist fellowships, and I started to take myself as an artist seriously.
And so, why I wanted to share 2019 is because 2020 is when all hell broke loose. I finished the year out and I was able to earn enough money to just survive. My husband found a job, I defended my dissertation, I entered the job market right at the moment COVID hits. There was sort of this moment of, like, the only thing that I know how to do is to keep making the part-time gig the full-time, and so my PhD research is about poets and spoken word artists who are educators. I was like: ‘we’re educational emcees’, and so I formed this company, Ed Emcee Academy, during that time period as like a consulting agency of us. And the book came right around the same time, and there’s no way to keep this short, but one of my dear friends is an incredible author—shout out to Jason Reynolds! He and I were at an event together one time, and there was a book signing line for him. I’m sitting on my phone, just sort of, like, probably texting or something, and this woman gets out of line with a little black boy, and they walk right up to me, and he says, “Mr. Tony, where’s your book?”
And it’s the spring of 2020. Like, this is literally, like, a month, like, a few weeks before COVID hit. “Where’s your book?” And I remember telling that little boy, I was like, oh, I publish on the stage, I don’t, you know, I don’t have any books. And the woman that he was with said, “Well, when you write it, let us know.” They walk away, and so all I can say is, February or March of 2020, this little boy pulled a book out. I thought that I was writing a young adult version of my dissertation so that he can understand what my PhD was all about, and it turned out to be my memoir, How the Boogeyman Became a Poet. And so that’s… and so all of that happened within 2019 to 2020. I had no dream, I mean, I had no idea I’d be an author, let alone an entrepreneur, but… Chaos created the circumstances where I had no choice but to rely on my voice.
I had no dream, I mean, I had no idea I’d be an author, let alone an entrepreneur, but… Chaos created the circumstances where I had no choice but to rely on my voice.
PLM: Gloria, what do you think? Did writing or entrepreneurship come first?
There are some intersects here with my own story, which is that Moonlit Musica, my business began in 2019 when I was a new parent. And my days have kind of flipped in my brain. Like, night was day, day was night. I was like, what is time? Who knows?
My partner and I started writing music, basically to stay awake, because we were, you know, trying to take care of a tiny person. It’s something that’s always been a part of my life, songwriting. My earliest songwriting gig—again, I come from a really musical family—was a lot of poetry and a lot of just fun and self-expression. And songs for me, when I was much younger, were an outlet. I have composition notebooks full of songs. And I used to write these, and I knew how to, like, read music by ear, but I didn’t… I could, you know… I was good at, like, matching a note if I needed to on a guitar or piano, but I wasn’t formally trained or anything like that. I was absolutely fascinated by how songs work and how they’re put together. I would sit by my stereo and record songs, so I could break them down. That was me as a kid. It’s something that’s always been a part of my life. There’s a direct connection to poetry, I think, in that writing and in that thinking, and of that figuring out, because poetry sometimes feels very like, math, you know, or like composing.
It came back in 2019 as a thing I’ve always turned to… I have some downtime, let me write a song. One of my first paid gigs, when I was taking voice lessons as a teenager, was writing a song for a boy band (a traveling boy band that my vocal teacher used to work with). And, because of that experience, I was like, yeah, I could do this, absolutely. In 2019, we formed Moonlit Musica, and I said ‘this has to be bilingual’ or even multilingual with multilingual literacy media. The goal was presenting things in two languages or in languages that move back and forth. I knew then that I wanted multilingual literacy to be a part of this in a really big way. We started working with educational groups, media companies… and then the pandemic happened in 2020! And we were like, oh, so now we have this thing that we’ve been building for half a year—How does everything change? Because everything had to change.
That’s when we began to pivot to learning how to work with people remotely, learning how we need to film a podcast or an audio story. We learned how to get everyone on board and get everyone in the same time zone to produce things. Learning to become a producer was something I had to take on because I was working very much from the writing side and composer side, but then, you know, the pandemic made us free to reconfigure ourselves. I figured out how to become a creative producer and how to really navigate people, different languages, different places, different time zones. And, you know, figuring out that business side, and that was really, really fascinating and fun.
Tony: I feel like the two of us, we could, with our powers combined, be like poets who are also entrepreneurs or who are also business owners. Perhaps that’s a future class or course!
PLM: Absolutely. That sounds great! I think there’s a lot for everyone to learn from poetry about cultivating your voice and how to communicate. So, what has poetry taught you over the years about honing your voice, and what would you consider to be the “power of poetics” that people can tap into to cultivate their voice?
Tony: I get really excited about this question in particular because, at 44 years old, the way that I’m really understanding how poetry is moving in my life is really interesting because you know, I sort of… I wrote poetry as a kid, as a way to express myself, dealing with emotional mess, right? So, short story—and I talk about this in How the Boogeyman Become a Poet—my parents were divorcing, I was coming out the closet, my father was dealing with a drug habit, and… I was being bullied, and I was poor. It was just, like, a lot going on in my world, and so I wrote poetry, not for the sake of pretty things. It wasn’t, for me, in the moment, art. It was just like, “yo, I’m feeling really sad, and… The only metaphor I have for sad right now is, you know, my foot is falling through a wishing well.” I don’t know, like, some silly thing. So I wrote to feel better. And that’s what I want at least the world out there to know, those of you who are like: ‘I’m not a poet, I’m not a poet.’ I cannot tell you what a traditional verse is, or maybe a stanza, I don’t know Iambic pentameter, and I don’t know what a sonnet is. I am not classically trained in the academic sense of poetry. It is the emotional release that I understand. And so, the rhyming, I think, just kind of comes, the flow just kind of comes depending… you know, Gloria, you have a musical background, so probably melody and rhythm probably just kind of comes naturally for you. But please know out there that poetry originally, for me started as, like, internal therapy. I hid my poems from people. Matter of fact, the poems that are in How the Boogeyman Became a Poet are poems that I rediscovered in my late 30s after my therapist was like, ‘Hey, Tony. Seems like you’ve got some suppressed emotions that are blocking you from doing all kinds of wonderful things.’ And I unpacked this box of poems, and I realized, ‘oh my gosh, that is where I held my grief. Where I held my anger, where I held my confusion.’ When I think about moments like this, where the world feels like a dumpster fire, I am still writing poetry. In my second book, Knucklehead, all the poems in there are poems that I’ve been writing to myself over the last 30 years. It’s because my point is, I go to poetry to figure things out, to feel better. So I just want to share that first.
It’s, for me, it’s… It’s beyond the art. It’s a connection with my voice thing. And so that’s what I would offer you. Those of you out there who are like, I’m not a poet. It does not have to rhyme; it does not have to look like any particular format. It is a creative release of your emotions in text. Poetry.
Gloria: I agree with so much there. I love the ability poetry has to enable us to reflect and really think with purpose about words and sounds and what we’re trying to express. The poet, the Chinese poet Du Fu said something like, “poetry makes you live twice.” I think poetry does make you really sit with your experience and with your dimensions and everything. I approach poetry from that space, and also—as I’ve been dabbling with other genres and now that I’ve written a novel and have another novel on the way in 2026—what I’ve learned through poetry has come through and really made me.
Think about, for example, internal dialogue and how characters’ internal life is expressed via subtext. That, for me, comes from poetry and is enhanced by how I understand a tiny moment in a poem. It can almost have this glacier effect and reveal itself.
In This Is the Year, I was moving towards full novel (all prose). And then I was like, “there are poems here.” Because this is how this character expresses who they are internally. Tony, you talked about hiding your poems. At the beginning of this book, my main character Julieta reveals she would never say, ‘I’m a poet.’ or ‘I’m a writer.’ And I put the poet in there because, you know, so many students or people at panels will say, “I really want to write, but I’m not sure if…” They’re basically saying, “I’m not sure if I have value, or I’m not sure if I’m ready, or I’m not sure if I matter.” And we’ve all felt that, so I acknowledge that.
But I also believe if you’re a human being on this earth with blood running through your veins, you can write because you have feelings, and you can approach poetry. I think poetry can feel very highbrow and difficult to break into, but if you have daily thoughts about your feelings and life and history, and your time here—that we’re all, like, in community, or that we’re all in outer space—there’s so many aspects to living that move us towards poetry, or leaping between the concrete and the figurative.
Tony: Oof! I love that. I love that. Gloria, really quick, something you said just really enjoyed. You mentioned—you probably didn’t say it explicitly—but this idea that in poetry, there’s this surprise, right? Like, there’s this moment of awareness or enlightening or awakening. I really look to poetry for moments like that, you know? I think so much about how the title of my first book, How the Boogeyman Became a Poet, came to be. It wasn’t until I wrote that book that I understood. That line comes from a poem that I have, it’s “…and so the boogeyman became a poet.” That was a line in a poem that I had, and it wasn’t until I started writing this book I could answer the question, what did I mean by that? When I learned, “oh, all those poems I was writing to myself as a kid, I was internalizing racism and homophobia.” I was internalizing these terrible things, and so the metaphor of a boogeyman—this idea that I was so afraid to be myself—that surprise came to me from a poem. So I think about what poetry—that gift that it gives—is clarity, right? That surprise and that clarity, I think.
PLM: Let’s dig a little bit deeper for some of those who are feeling ready to take the next step. Maybe they’ve thought about cultivating their voice and their writing. They’re out there doing something as a professional. What strategies do you recommend for someone who’s looking to take that next step in cultivating their voice? Perhaps they’re ready to sit down and establish their organizational identity and their professional profile. How do you take everything you’re feeling and condense it?
Gloria: That’s such a huge question, so it depends where you’re at in your journey. If you’re just starting out—like, ‘I have written something, and now what?’ or maybe ‘How do I connect to my voice more through that process?’—finding your voice is something that’s gonna change as you change. One of my favorite things about being a writer is that you get to have stages and shift and evolve and grow. So if I was starting out right now and I wanted to figure out, ‘what is my voice? I have good ideas, but how do I sit down with them and get them to move from ideation into being a project?’ The most straightforward answer here is time—dedicating time focusing. Finding that time is hard because we’re pulled in lots of different directions. I would say, if you can, like, even when you’re walking somewhere—like when you’re walking to your commute—when you’re driving in your car, when you’re, having, you know, passive time throughout the day where you have the interstitial, the in-between time of your day, I would say focus on thinking about the project. Focus on thinking about a character. Sometimes I think about a song that reminds me of the project. Think about the world, right? Because for me, so much writing comes from observation and from carrying the project even before I’m sitting down to write it. Let it be a part of you. That idea you have will not leave you alone, most likely, especially if it’s one you’ve come back to and that is relevant deep down. Even though you might be asking, ‘is this important?’ You know it’s important because it’s in there. And the longer it’s in there the harder it’s going to become. So you want to give it that time—the percolating or the brewing of the idea.
If you’re just starting out—like, ‘I have written something, and now what?’ or maybe ‘How do I connect to my voice more through that process?’—finding your voice is something that’s gonna change as you change. One of my favorite things about being a writer is that you get to have stages and shift and evolve and grow.
And then, when you sit down to write, let yourself write without censorship. I do this all the time. I have here a stack of business cards and they’re just random business cards that I’ve collected. Once I’ve saved that information, I put them on my desk and actually fold them like this [folds card in half to make a tent], and I put them over my backspace. I encourage you to try that because we censor ourselves so very much. If you’re a perfectionist, or if you’re very new and feeling some self-doubt you will sit down and be like, ‘oh no, that’s not good, backspace, backspace, let me delete this, let me start over’. Then you’re moving nowhere but back, right? So you want to give yourself some time to write, to let it be messy. You can write recording on your phone, or you can write with a pen or a pencil. You can give yourself time to draft, but not censor yourself. If you want to try my technique of a folded business card, you can try that, or even a little post-it. Just give yourself time to be messy, to workshop, and to have fun—because it should be fun! Writing should feel really good and exciting when you sit down to write, so give yourself that time, and then from there you will begin shaping your story, or your poetry, or whatever you’re working on. And you will begin to cultivate your voice. You will begin to figure out because you’ve not only decided, ‘I woke up one day, I’m gonna sit down and write.’ No, you’ve been carrying, you’ve been thinking, you’ve been figuring out the fertile ground for the story, and now you’re sitting down to spend more time with it. And stay in it as much as you can even when you’re working or not writing. It’s like carrying that story, and know you’re gonna return to it, and you’re gonna keep giving time to it. For me, when you’re first starting out, one of the most important things is to trust and to offer time and space. That’s gonna look different for everyone.
If you have a book that you have written, and, you’re further along the road here, and you’re trying to figure things out in terms of business and all of that. First things first, I would recommend a writing group and I would recommend talking with your peers, whether you’re in school or if you have friends who are writers, and just letting them understand your voice or what you’re trying to do in the book. Then, give them some of your pages, and see how that’s coming through because people who know you well will also be good sounding boards.
Tony: All of that, y’all, uh, we’re done! Uh, I don’t… no, seriously, uh, I was thinking to myself, like, yup, I was gonna say that, and I’d say that, so… Everything that Gloria said and I think that what I could offer here, because something that I was sort of extracting from what you were saying, like, more broadly is I have this philosophy, y’all. You can’t see it now because I’m in my home office and there’s no windows and things in here, but I have like 18 or 19 houseplants. This is important. I have this philosophy, and I’d love to offer it to you all, and if you have houseplants and you would understand some of this:
When the soil is right. Right? When it’s got a good pot. When you water it well, a little bit of water should kind of come out the bottom, right? Just enough, which means the soil is saturated, which means it’s consumed enough of what it needs to produce something.
And so, for those of you out there, if you’re thinking about starting a business, if you’re thinking about writing a book, if you want to add more to your book, if you find yourself in writer’s block, if you find yourself needing to form community… whatever that might look like as you’re on your journey, think about what are you consuming.
A personal experience really quickly because I have to just share this: Everything’s going to go back to my first book probably because that was a moment when I was like, ‘oh my gosh, I’m an author, and I’m gonna write books.’ And I knew—because I was not someone who really enjoyed reading that much—I was like, if I’m gonna write books, I need to read books. I need to… Figure this out. And that’s… honestly, y’all, why I write YA. I started reading: Elizabeth Acevedo, Candice Iloh, Mahogany Browne, of course Jason Reynolds, Nick Brooks. Like, I started reading the works of black and brown writers who had this rhythmic flow, and reading their works helped me understand what my voice—what poetic verse structure could look like on the page—and so I was able to find my community by reading people whose books I believe my books would sit on shelves with. That, for me, is community, right? So think about… What are you consuming that’s contributing to what you are trying to produce? And that could also mean making space—because I love your backspace idea, Gloria. I’m also thinking about, because so many of us are on our phones, you all probably hear this quite a bit, and no judgment here, but… Check your algorithm, right? Like, maybe you might want to enter some new search terms so that if you’re going to scroll on your phone, you consume and feed the thing that you’re trying to grow.
If you look at my phone right now, y’all, you would see a whole lot of vegetarian recipes, because I don’t know why I’m trying to figure out how to eat better or something… But adjust your algorithms. My point is, if you’re gonna stare at a TV screen and look at Netflix specials all day, look at Netflix specials that are related to the thing you’re trying to do—consume to produce.
So think about… What are you consuming that’s contributing to what you are trying to produce? Check your algorithm, right? Like, maybe you might want to enter some new search terms so that if you’re going to scroll on your phone, you consume and feed the thing that you’re trying to grow.
PLM: Oh, that is such good advice, and I think that it applies across industries. Speaking of across industries, PLM works with a lot of event hosts, some of whom have hosted the two of you. You previously alluded to it, but it’s been a tough year. There have been some changes in priorities and how events get funded. There are some new roadblocks and additional scrutiny, particularly when it comes to arts and humanities and grants. So, I’m just curious, what advice or strategies do you have to share for an organization who’s trying to stay true to their mission and voice, but also needs to court that outside support? And what is one way you’re pivoting to meet the moment?
Tony: I love this question. I serve on the board of quite a few organizations and also kind of consult in these ways with organizations that are trying to also figure out this moment. And the two things that kind of come to mind are: 1) language 2) philosophy. I have a PhD, and I’m a philosopher, go with me on this.
Something I’ve realized is those organizations that are like, ‘hey, we need to remove X, Y, and Z, we have to take this out, we have to take this out.’ What I’ve been sharing with them is:
Removing language is sort of one form of action. But if you remove the philosophy that was attached to that language from your organization, then I think you’re missing out.
And I think so much about, like over at least the last decade… The work that the Ed Emcee Academy, what we were doing, we sort of… you know, branded ourselves as doing educational consulting within DEI, but from a poetry and spoken word perspective. And so we had to literally remove that language because the people who usually do business with us are non-profit organizations who get funding from X, Y, and Z, and their ability to contract us was based on their ability to get this money. I’m like, ‘hey, you all have already participated in all the diversity trainings. You all have already got all the language around—this has been going on for decades, right? I started my work coming up in my graduate school era, it was called ‘multicultural affairs’ or something like that, but, my point is: The language of justice and equity and philosophy, that’s been existing. If your organization was already actively engaging in that, then if you’re adjusting language, you’re not adjusting your philosophy. You are absolutely understanding how to pivot in the moment. And the last thing that I’ll say is, one of the pivots that I’ve made is what I realize is, in this particular moment, a lot of the work that I would do around belonging and equity now has transformed into hope and passion, and discovering your purpose because what I’m realizing is a lot of organizations that are out there are struggling with team morale. It’s how do I keep myself and my team, or the school, or the board in an empowered sort of state. So for me, the way that I do that, or how I’ve pivoted, is I focus on this idea that—Gloria mentioned this before—we are spinning on a planet in space right now while we’re also on this video call. Which means there’s a lot more going on in the world, and that means that we have a purpose to be here. And so a lot of what I’ve been trying to share with these organizations is: Remember, you’ve got a purpose. You know, you as an individual, and then you as an individual working within an organization, whether you own it or not. My business has a purpose, but I, as an individual, have a purpose, and so I would say… In this moment, if you’ve got to pivot anything, pivot to focus on your purpose work. What’s serving your purpose, right? Do that. And if you’ve got to adjust your language and your mission statement to make sure that it’s in more service of purpose, now we’re talking.
In this moment, if you’ve got to pivot anything, pivot to focus on your purpose work. What’s serving your purpose, right? Do that. And if you’ve got to adjust your language and your mission statement to make sure that it’s in more service of purpose, now we’re talking.
Gloria: Absolutely. The pandemic, like right now, that definitely—to stay within the planetary realm—knocked us off our axes. So, it is a time to take stock. That does not mean go to sleep; it’s not a hibernation. We need to be awake, but it is a time to take stock in your values and how they’re going to be presented, and I do you think the conversation of hope is really important. I talk a lot about hope and speculative fiction and hope in dystopia right now because I’m interested in climate fiction. This Is the Year is climate fiction. I’m really interested in how we take time that feels… fully hopeless and find further possibilities from that space. Because that is, again, it is what we have to do as human beings. It’s what we have to do as artists. It’s what we have to do as educators, as people who work in organizations…. You do not shut your doors when people need you most. Instead, you look for that light coming in through the side of the doors, and you’re like, ‘okay, I can work with this.’ And you figure out how to move through that space.
I would say it’s also a time—if I was someone who is running an arts organization, which I think was part of your question— I’ve worked a lot in theater nonprofits, film nonprofits. I founded a film nonprofit, so I’ve worked a lot in those spaces.
When people need you most, I think it’s easy to say we’re just gonna reconfigure our programming, like and shove these things that are really important but are being banned and censored in different ways off the table, and we’ll come back to those in a few years. Instead, I encourage you to sit with those difficult topics and figure out ways to code them, or ways to… find other angles to approach those conversations.
And coding, I lived in Florida, we… had a lot of words that were being taken out of [public use] by state legislature, and trying to figure out next steps… Like, we wanted to talk about climate. We wanted to talk about climate change, but now climate change is a phrase that could be omitted. So how do you do that? Well, let’s go micro. Maybe this is like a poet thing. Okay, let’s go micro and we’re gonna talk about this one creek specifically and the community affected by this creek. And now we’re making it about people. We’re not making it about something that’s gonna be voted upon, even though yes, it’s like a direct channel. But I’m like,’ if you want me to play, like, Mad Libs I will Mad Libs a grant all the way to completion, and figure out how to get there because it is a means to an end, right? So it’s not about the exact sliding in of terms… It’s more about doing the work right now.
I would love to live in a world in which we’re not worried about the words of the shifting, but you know, we are here. This is the time we’re in, so we’re ready to play. We’re ready to play the game.
I met with Poet Laureate Fellows from the Academy of American Poets from all over the country, and we, so many of us in all these cities, you know, every direction, every part of the country talked about this. And we just said, “Well, now more than ever, which feels very precedent right now, we gotta figure this out. We’re poets, and that’s what we do. We can figure out how to write a poem. We can figure out how to write books. We can figure out how to continue to work in communities.”
I would love to live in a world in which we’re not worried about the words of the shifting, but you know, we are here. This is the time we’re in, so we’re ready to play. We’re ready to play the game.
PLM: Here’s a question from our audience: “How do you recognize which one is THE voice?”
Tony: I love this question, and so I’m gonna… the lens that I’m gonna put on is not necessarily an author lens, but in my previous professional role, I did a lot of college prep and work with high school students by preparing them to apply to college and go to college. Anyway, I told them, I was like, you know, right around this time, you’re gonna hear a lot of noise.
You’re gonna hear people in your life saying, do this, apply here, go here, go blah blah blah blah… And then you’re gonna hear your voice saying what you probably also want to do. The goal is to turn the volume on their voices down and the volume of yours up. Right? And so the reason why I say that is, if you’re hearing multiple voices, the question is, whose voices are they? For me, when I was younger and I was hearing, ‘you can’t do this, or you’ll be like this, blah blah blah…’ a lot of that negative stuff was coming from bullies, was coming from people who did not love me, or who didn’t care about me. But then I would hear, ‘Oh, Tony, you’re so sweet and joyful and wonderful.’ I was like, you know what, I’m gonna lean more into those voices, right? And that also required creating affirmations so that I can say things to myself, which I think is where poems came from. I’d be reading these affirmations to myself, and what they would do is they would start silencing out the noise of other things. And so I would just say, identify the voice—whose voices are they? Which one is yours? And where are the other ones coming from? And are they serving the purpose of the poem or project, which probably gets to the what do you write about, right?
When I think about putting together, especially if it’s a poetry collection, um, it’s a matter of what’s the purpose of that poetry collection and who is it for? Who is in that audience? I’m a spoken word artist, I love a live moment where I can see the audience, right? I know who I’m performing for because I can see them. A book is a little bit different. I might not see everybody who picks it up. So for me, when I wrote my second book, Knucklehead, which is a poetry collection, I knew that I wanted to write to knuckleheads. I wanted to write to—literally, when I’m sitting at my computer compiling the list of poems—I’m thinking about young black and brown boys who probably hear some negative things and some positive things, and they’re trying to make sense of themselves. And when I was growing up, I was called a knucklehead, so I was like, I’m gonna write to knuckleheads and the people who love knuckleheads. It became the purpose of the book. The purpose of the poems was to provide affirmations, was to help turn up the voices of a knucklehead, and turn down the voices of society and oppression and mess.
Identify whose the voices are, and are they serving the purpose? If not, then you don’t need them.
Gloria: I think that the voices are, for me, sometimes ideas—ideas wanting my attention. They might feel like different voices. I try to give them each a little bit of room. Like I’m writing down the beginning of what you’re telling me, and then I decide how much value or time or space I want to give that.
If it is a negative voice, I would say those negative voice, that negative self-talk for writers… It will be there, but you can only give it the importance you want to give it, right? Quiet that down, and know that there’s a lot of under-qualified people doing all kinds of things right now in the world. You’re ready. You are capable, your voice is important. Quiet that other one and raise that voice in you that’s curious and excited. And the one that’s like, ‘I’m ready. I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna write because I’m here spinning on a planet. Why not?’ So sit down and think about that, and bring that voice up to high volume.
If they are different ideas, and you’re having trouble selecting like, ‘I want to be on this track, now I want to be on this track, this track…. Write them all down. I have a notebook. I don’t have it here, but it’s a notebook and it has little dividers. You can also make this. I call it my idea notebook because I have a lot of different ideas and voices from those ideas that are like characters and different things that are running through my head. Sometimes I’ll just sit and write the new idea down in a little section, and [in the future] I know I have that little section, so anytime I have another flash of that project, even though I can’t get to it at this moment, I put it in there. I write it in there. Or sometimes if I don’t have my notebook, which is rare, because I carry it all over the place, I’ll text myself about it. And I’ll be like, ‘for this project, da-da-da-da-da’, and then I’ll put it in the notebook when I can. It just helps me keep track of things.
It’s another link to prioritizing. Sometimes it’s a question of practicality, you know? I gotta finish this or I’m on deadline. I’ll just sit down with that voice and with that project, and really focus on it and know that the other ones—because we’re multifaceted and able to think many things at once—the other ones will be there. I will continue to percolate them. If I know the voice of the project that I’m working on right now and this other project keeps calling to me and won’t leave me alone, I give it some attention even while I’m writing this other book. I just can’t fully give it my attention.
PLM: That is an excellent tip! I would like to wrap up with a final question: What is your latest idea or strategy for leading with hope?
Tony: Wow, this is great. So it’s funny, because it’s related to what I’m gonna do after this call is over. And so, we all know that during this moment, libraries just need a lot of love. I’ve now been elected as the interim president of my neighborhood friends of my library. After this meeting, I’m gonna go there, and we’re gonna brainstorm about fundraising and how to support that place, and maybe build a bookstore inside the library that functions as a way to generate revenue for the neighborhood, and for those who don’t know, I am in Washington, D.C, I live in Ward 7, and those who don’t know much about the context: We are one of the blackest and poorest parts of the city, in addition to Ward 8. To have a neighborhood, I mean, an institution with books—my books are on shelves there—I’m thinking about this moment [in my service]. My pivot is thinking about how my platform as an author, as an artist, as a hip-hop educator, entrepreneur, how that can serve my neighborhood and my local community. I think more about geography when it comes to community. Of course, Gloria’s in my community, too. Not geographically, but this is my community in terms of an author. However, I’m focusing on the local spot. What’s happening right down the street from me is where I’m putting a lot of my care.
[SHIFT THE MIC IDEA]: In events, I have—and this actually came out of the pandemic, but there was this moment when there was a call for virtual programming for students, and so I developed poetic lectures. I give them in person now, which are great, but they are poetically formatted Google Slides that have, like, a lyrical script. And essentially, they’re these performances of poems that talk about leadership and justice and discovering your voice and finding your passion. Also, some that are more leaning toward leadership development or some that focus on belonging and equity. For certain settings they are more performance-based, but they can include writing exercises. I play music and we talk about hip-hop, but it’s very much a guided experience and they are a blast.
Gloria: I love the idea of thinking where you’re at. I think that’s really important. It’s something that I did a lot in Florida, and now that I live in Minneapolis, I’ll be, you know, cultivating that as well. I’m leaning into… continuing to tell stories that are important to me and that feel relevant to the world, and that have social dialogue in them. And I’m finding ways to do that that also allow me to kind of take care of myself and take care of my reader.
I think every story that I write—while they will be, you know, dystopic or speculative in different ways, or even like This Is the Year as a climate fiction (cli-fi), which deals with what it means to be preparing and recovering from a time—all of these stories will have strands of hope in them, and will encourage people to think of their community in all the possibilities of the now and of these times. My next book is set in the near future. It’s a dark academia and a very witchy book that deals with censorship and weaponized intellectualism. And so, you know, those topics are still going to run in there, and we’re gonna have a lot of fun, also, because it’s an ensemble cast, and there’s witchiness and powers and ancestral/intergenerational themes.
I’m excited and ready and feel like I want to inspire students to also not censor themselves and be able to tell the story they want to tell. Even at this exact moment, when things feel really tricky and strange, to be able to find the hope there, to be able to find the possibilities their book leads them to through the power of fiction.
Thank you for reading! To follow Gloria, check out her website for ways to connect. To follow Tony, check out his website for ways to connect.