City: Providence, Rhode Island

How did you begin doing spoken word and poetry?

(laughs) This is the origin story that I always tell, and I’m not even sure if it’s true anymore. I think what happened is that I read Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” And I was like, holy shit, this is poetry that is exciting and dirty and risky and angry and it’s clearly meant to be read aloud. And I knew that the controversy was that Ginsberg had read this poem out loud in public, and I was really fascinated and captivated by that idea. So I sought out open mics in Atlanta—  where I went to high school— and sort of went searching for that same type of energy, and what that felt like today. And that’s kind of how I started– how I got on this winding path to poetry.