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ENTRY TYPE: new
WORK TITLE: HOW THE BOOGEYMAN BECAME A POET
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.tonykeithjr.com
CITY: Washington
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 17, 1981, in Freehold, NJ; married Harry Christian III, ca. 2019.
EDUCATION:University of Maryland, College Park, B.A. (communication studies); Pennsylvania State University, M.Ed. (college student affairs); George Mason University, Ph.D. (educational leadership).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator, poet, writer, and entrepreneur. Has taught in Washington, DC, including an adult English class at a public charter school; former nonprofit program director and assistant professor; Ed Emcee Academy, founder and CEO; spoken-word performer and hip-hop educator.
AWARDS:Tom Howard Poetry Contest winner, for “Black Man on Fire”; awards from the George Mason University College of Education and Human Development and from the American Education Research Association (AERA) Hip Hop Theories, Praxis and Pedagogies group, both for dissertation “On Being Ed Emcees”; DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowship grants.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including Poemhood: Our Black Revival, edited by Amber McBride, Taylor Byas, and Erica Martin, HarperTeen (New York, NY), 2024; and to periodicals, including Equity & Excellence in Education, International Journal of Critical Media Literacy, Journal of Black Masculinity, and Journal of Negro Education.
SIDELIGHTS
[open new]A doctorate-holding pioneer in hip-hop education leadership, Tony Keith Jr. has written a verse memoir and other poetry for young adults. He was born in New Jersey, where his father was in military training, and raised in the environs of Washington, DC, in a family with limited resources. As a singer in the Good Luck Church youth choir, he was moved to see how members of the congregation intensified their listening by closing their eyes, as if accessing a spiritual plane. Speaking with Publishers Weekly, Keith connected this revelation to his later career: “Hip-hop educators often talk about how emcees move crowds with microphones, just like a pastor can move a congregation or a teacher can move a classroom. Poetry is the exact same way. I often tell folks, if you see me performing on stage, the moment I close my eyes, that means that I’ve transcended, I’m in a different place, I’m performing my poetry from the spiritual world.” Adolescence was a challenge for Keith owing to his identity as a gay Black young man. In retrospect, he realized that dealing with prejudice over his race, sexual identity, and socioeconomic status led him to internalize much of that prejudice, which stifled his personal growth. Keeping his innermost thoughts to himself among his peers, Keith channeled his need for self-expression into poetry.
About this period of his life, Keith told the American Booksellers Association: “I was afraid back then, that how I came out in the world, and who I am, was somehow wrong. But my poems served as evidence of my humanity.” He went on to add: “Poetry was, and still is, my way of figuring out what’s going on in my world. … Writing metaphors about feeling anxious, confused, sad, and angry was an organic and healthy practice of resisting racism, classism, and heterosexism that silences voices like mine. I could safely, secretly, and quietly put on the page what I could not say out loud. That process not only made me more aware of my voice, but helped me develop my identity as a poet. Plus, the positive responses from audiences after my performances improved my self-esteem and strengthened my confidence as a writer and performer.”
In higher education, Keith earned a series of degrees in communication and education and won awards with his doctoral dissertation “On Being Ed Emcees: Mastering Conditions in Education through Hip-Hop and Spoken Words.” His motivation to write a book aimed at younger audiences came while he was leading workshops alongside famous middle-grade author Jason Reynolds at the University of South Carolina in 2020. At Reynolds’s book signing, a boy who—as Keith told Danielle Buckingham of Reckon—looked just like Keith himself as a youth stepped out of line to ask, “Tony, where’s your book?” That night Keith determined to write something meaningful for youths like that boy, and before long he was plumbing the box of poems saved since his teenage years. In writing verse, Keith embraces the use of African American Vernacular English—the particular mode and patterns of expression that Black American communities have developed and refined over the centuries. Living in Washington, DC, with his husband, he is devoted to running Ed Emcee Academy, the hip-hop education training and leadership program he founded.
How the Boogeyman Became a Poet, Keith’s debut memoir in verse, centers around his senior year of high school in 1999. By this time, his father was distant and unreliable, while his mother worked two jobs to keep the family afloat. Attending DuVal High, in Lanham, Maryland, Keith felt lost in a world where performative masculinity was what propped up his superficial, but false, social identity. He was thirteen when the impulse to translate gripping emotion—on that occasion, sadness—into poetic expression first seized him. He was placed in the gifted and talented track, but an English teacher dampened his spirits with a narrow-minded critique of his poetics. Nevertheless, he continued to write. The volume’s poems cover milestones like the SATs and college applications as well as challenges in grappling with his sexual orientation and growing into his identity as a poet. Enlivening the narrative are photos, images of handwritten poems, and instant-message chats. Keith was inspired to write the poem whose last line, ten years later, figured the collection’s title after a fellow gay Black man who was feeling downcast called in hopes that Keith could cheer him up. The “boogeyman” signifies Keith’s own doubts and fears.
Affirming that Keith’s “vulnerability” will inspire teens’ sympathy, a Kirkus Reviews writer hailed How the Boogeyman Became a Poet as “an emotionally honest and self-reflective debut.” In Booklist, Kathleen McBroom proclaimed that Keith’s “poetic prowess becomes evident” as “marvelously expressive lines fly across pages.” McBroom declared that “searing honesty and deft wordplay create a vivid impression” of Keith’s life experiences and selfhood.[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 2024, Kathleen McBroom, review of How the Boogeyman Became a Poet, p. 50.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2023, review of How the Boogeyman Became a Poet.
ONLINE
American Booksellers Association website, https://www.bookweb.org/ (January 24, 2024), Maryan Liban, “An Indies Introduce Q&A with Tony Keith, Jr.”
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (February 1, 2024), Amanda Ramirez, author Q&A.
Reckon, https://www.reckon.news/ (February 8, 2024), Danielle Buckingham, “Ed Emcee Tony Keith Wants Young People to Use the Power of Creativity to Banish Their Boogeyman.”
Tony Keith Jr. website, https://www.tonykeithjr.com (August 18, 2024).
Tony Keith Jr. is a Black American gay poet, spoken word artist, and hip-hop educational leader from Washington, DC. He is author of the YA memoir in verse How the Boogeyman Became a Poet. Tony’s writings have appeared in the International Journal of Critical Media Literacy, the Journal of Black Masculinity, and many others. A multiyear Fellow of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities with a PhD in education from George Mason University, Tony is CEO of Ed Emcee Academy and lives with his husband, Harry Christian III, in his DC hometown. Visit him at tonykeithjr.com.
Tony Keith Jr., PhD
is an award-winning Black American gay poet, spoken word artist, and Hip-Hop educational leader from Washington DC. Or, you can just call him an “Ed Emcee”. He is author of How the Boogeyman Became a Poet - a young adult (YA) memoir in verse, and Knucklehead (Winter 2025) - a YA poetry collection, both published by Katherine Tegen Books at HarpersCollins.
A multi-year fellow of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Tony has featured performances at John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington National Cathedral, Historic Lincoln Theatre, Bus Boys & Poets, and in schools and communities in Johannesburg, South Africa, Arusha Tanzania, and many more.
He is co-author of the award-winning book Open Mic Night: Campus Programs that Champion College Student Voice and Engagement, and his academic work appears in the International Journal of Critical Media Literacy, Equity & Excellence in Education, the Journal of Black Masculinity, the Journal of Negro Education and several others.
He earned his BA in Communication Studies from University of Maryland College Park, an M.Ed. in College Student Affairs from Penn State University, and his PhD in Education Leadership from George Mason University. Tony’s award-winning dissertation, Educational Emcees: Mastering Conditions in Education Through Hip-Hop and Spoken Words, inspired the founding of his company “Ed Emcee Academy” in his DC hometown where he lives with his husband, Harry Christian III.
Q & A with Tony Keith Jr.
By Amanda Ramirez | Feb 01, 2024
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In his debut YA verse memoir, How the Boogeyman Became a Poet, hip-hop educator and spoken word artist Tony Keith Jr. incorporates black-and-white photos as well as handwritten and photocopied poems from his youth as he unravels traumatic and joy-filled moments from his adolescence. Growing up in Washington, D.C., in a financially struggling family in the late 1990s, Keith grappled with his identity as a closeted gay Black teen while dealing with homophobia and racism—both internal and external—and yearning to make sense of his fear, shame, and self-doubt, which manifest as the eponymous boogeyman. In a conversation with PW, Keith reflects on the similarities between performing at church and performing poetry, examines how language helped him navigate childhood, and expresses gratitude and pride for his younger self.
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What has your experience been like developing your debut?
I was just talking with one of my very dear friends, Jason Reynolds, about what my experience has been like. I’m not someone with an MFA. I don’t have an academic background in literature. I’ve just always been a poet. If anything, the learning curve has been incredibly sharp. By trade, I’m a guy with a PhD who’s had articles published in academic journals using words with 13 letters, so it feels like I’m being introduced to so much new language about the publishing world. Last night, I found myself on stage with Ibram X. Kendi, in conversation about his recent release [middle grade nonfiction adaptation Barracoon], and I’d just learned that I was going to be having a phone call with Publishers Weekly. To have a book in this space, and to have it be celebrated in this way, it’s exciting.
It’s inspiring too. I work with so many young and adult writers, and I’m sharing this journey with them. So, they’re getting the opportunity to understand what publishing is about. It’s a very important part of what I’m hoping this book does; I hope it introduces folks to literature.
In a beginning note, you write that you turned to poetry because you didn’t have the language “to describe systemic racism, poverty, homophobia, and white supremacy.” Have you considered what your childhood might have looked like or who you’d be now if you had grown up with that language?
Absolutely. If I would have had the language then, especially when it came to my sexual identity, I would have been able to say to myself, “The thing that you’re experiencing right now is very normal. You’re just questioning yourself. This is a thing that a lot of people do.” Just to have that language would have been really helpful. Or for someone to say that racism doesn’t necessarily always look like someone calling me a slur. It could look like someone saying that my language is wrong or bad without providing any context. I wrote How the Boogeyman Became a Poet in African American Vernacular English on purpose. If someone had told me that there was something called AAVE, I probably would have come up sooner. I probably would’ve had a very different college experience.
And I have to pat Little Tony on the back because I’m so glad that he figured out a way to write about the things that I could not fully explain, especially emotions. Little Tony wouldn’t have said, “I’m mad,” or, “I’m sad.” He would have said, “I feel like the moon is falling out of the sky.”
Is using metaphors to describe how you were feeling how “the Boogeyman” came about?
“And so that the Boogeyman could become a poet” is the last line of the last poem in the book. I wrote that poem 10 years ago after a buddy of mine—another Black gay man—called me to cheer him up. He was engaging in a lot of negative self-talk, he wasn’t happy, he was just not having a good day. When we got off the phone, I felt heavy. I needed a way to process that call.
Some poets and writers might say that all our work is for us first. I kept that line for myself, because I was like, I’m clearly supposed to get something out of this. It wasn’t until it came time to title this book and figure out how to write it that I thought of that line. I remember reading How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon, and the titles were always a question. I liked that idea; I wanted to research that question. I decided to write the book almost as if I was writing an academic essay answering the question “how did the Boogeyman become a poet?”
I was midway through writing when I had the aha! moment of, “You’ve been afraid of yourself in the mirror this whole time. You’ve been internalizing racism, you’ve been internalizing homophobia, you’ve been internalizing a poverty mindset. You grew up internalizing these beliefs about yourself, and it made you scared of your greatness.” That’s what that poem had been about, and that’s how it manifested itself.
Was it ever difficult for you to revisit challenging memories from your adolescence?
I cried a lot while writing this book, particularly while writing about my friend Gary Hopkins Jr., who was killed in the late 1990s. I remember waking up at three o’clock in the morning for some reason, and I ran downstairs to my office, and I just started pecking away at my keyboard because for me, writing something for the first time is like a purge: I gotta get all the emotions out. After I found the police report for his death I just started bawling at my computer and all I could think was, “I’m still holding on to this grief. Who knew this still existed?”
There were some tough moments, all right. But of course, lots of joy.
How did your relationship with your faith and your time in the Good Luck Church youth choir affect the way you viewed yourself as a performer?
“
There were some tough moments, all right. But of course, lots of joy.
”
Good Luck Church taught me spirituality, and I don’t mean Christianity. At the time, I was beginning to understand spoken word, how it can affect people, and the idea that there’s a spiritual or metaphysical relationship between words spoken out of the mouth, and how they land on audiences.
I remember singing at Good Luck Church, and these people are responding by closing their eyes. It’s like I’m involved in a spiritual practice. Hip-hop educators often talk about how emcees move crowds with microphones, just like a pastor can move a congregation or a teacher can move a classroom. Poetry is the exact same way. I often tell folks, if you see me performing on stage, the moment I close my eyes, that means that I’ve transcended, I’m in a different place, I’m performing my poetry from the spiritual world. As I was writing this book, I was like, if I don’t feel that thing—I guess I would call it God—in the writing, then I don’t think it’s right.
I’ll be 43 this year and I still practice performing poetry in the mirror. There’s something about seeing myself and understanding how people might see me, knowing that there’s a relationship between myself and an audience or myself and a reader that reminds me that it’s not a single act. There’s at least two of us at minimum involved in this process.
How important is the visual presentation of a work to its reception?
My natural way of writing poetry is usually with everything left justified. But there was a rhythm to the book that I wanted readers to experience so that it wasn’t just a static thing. It was important to include stanza breaks and line breaks because it divided the text, especially for readers who might be, I don’t want to say afraid, but hesitant about too much text on the page.
I used to teach an adult English Language Arts class at a public charter school in D.C. I would show them excerpts of my book, when I just had the PDFs, and they said they really liked that the text was not visually intimidating. Most of these adult learners didn’t have a wonderful relationship with literature, but they were able to read my book and others like it because that format made it appealing, it drew them in and made them want more.
Throughout your memoir, you talk about how you always felt as if you were putting on a performance. Did this help or hinder you in your journey toward self-discovery and cultivating community?
It’s interesting, because it wasn’t as if I was a gay kid who was out there kissing boys. I was still just figuring it out. It wasn’t like I was living a double life either; it was sort of like having these two lives exist at the same time. If I didn’t let people know what I was thinking, if I didn’t say it out loud, I was safe. Having these two lives was about safety. It was about survival.
The handwritten and photocopied poems that I included in the book are the ones that I kept from when I was a kid. It wasn’t until my therapist was like, “Tony, that box of poems you said you’ve been lugging around? You might need to take that thing out and figure out what’s going on with you.” And so, I sat in my house for three days and read through them all. I laughed at some; I cried; I tore some of them apart. But I knew I had to keep them. Not even to put in the book, because I wasn’t writing a book at the time, but I needed to save certain words that really, really meant something to me—they helped me, they made me realize that I was human, that I had emotions.
I think about the fact that I’m about to be 43 and that my husband and I have been married for five years. And I think, “Wow, I really did become a poet.” Because those two lives protected me.
Can you talk about Knucklehead, your YA poetry collection that’s slated for 2025, and how it relates to How the Boogeyman Became a Poet?
I actually wrote Knucklehead first. In the original proposal, I wrote that I was also working on a YA verse memoir titled How the Boogeyman Became a Poet. So, when I got hooked up with Ben Rosenthal at HarperCollins, he was like, “That poetry collection can come but we need How the Boogeyman Became a Poet first.”
After writing How the Boogeyman Became a Poet, it became so clear what Knucklehead should be. It consists of five or six letters that are addressed “Dear Knucklehead” because, in my community, we call little Black boys “knucklehead.” Within those sections are poems about Black masculinity and Black queerness and finding your purpose and love and justice and joy. The way Knucklehead is written, you can see direct correlations to How the Boogeyman Became a Poet. In fact, one of the poems in my memoir says, “so y’all gonna have to come back later on/ if you wanna hear this knucklehead spit part two.” I wanted readers to see the connection between the two. These two books absolutely complement each other.
Knucklehead was the poetry that got me here. It was those poems that got me to my agent, Annie Hwang, and to HarperCollins. The memoir just had to come first. Annie says, “It’s like flesh and bones. The poetry collection is the bones, but the memoir is the flesh.”
What else are you working on?
My two worlds are colliding right now in a wonderful way. I got laid off from my full-time job in 2019, so I’ve been working for myself for the last five years. I’ve built a career with Ed Emcee Academy employing poets and spoken word artists to do really fun stuff with education. I’m always visiting schools and libraries and museums, doing poetry and writing workshops. So, some of the dates on the How the Boogeyman Became a Poet book tour are dates that I was already doing stuff through Emcee Academy. Combining those has been a dream. It’s as if this book and my business are each at a place where everything is aligned.
How the Boogeyman Became a Poet by Tony Keith Jr. HarperCollins/Tegen, $19.99 Feb. 6 ISBN 978-0-06-329600-8
JAN
24
2024
INDIES INTRODUCE
An Indies Introduce Q&A with Tony Keith, Jr.
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Tony Keith, Jr. is the author of How the Boogeyman Became a Poet, a Winter/Spring 2024 Indies Introduce young adult selection.
Keith is an award-winning Black American gay poet, spoken word artist, and Hip-Hop educational leader from Washington DC. He is author of How the Boogeyman Became a Poet and Knucklehead (Winter 2025).
Tony’s poem “Views for Damani” is included in the YA poetry collection Poemhood: Our Black Revival and his piece “Black Man on Fire” won first prize in the Tom Howard Poetry Contest.
He is co-author of Open Mic Night: Campus Programs that Champion College Student Voice and Engagement, which received an outstanding book award in Curriculum Studies from the American Education Research Association (AERA). He has academic work featured and forthcoming in the International Journal of Critical Media Literacy, Equity & Excellence in Education, the Journal of Black Masculinity, the Journal of Negro Education and several others.
His dissertation, “On Being Ed Emcees: Mastering Conditions in Education Through Hip-Hop and Spoken Words,” won outstanding awards from George Mason University College of Education and Human Development, the Hip Hop Theories, Praxis and Pedagogies group of AERA, and several fellowship grants from HumanitiesDC.
Tony is Founder & CEO of Ed Emcee Academy and lives with his husband, Harry Christian III, in his DC hometown.
Maryan Liban of Cover to Cover Books for Young Readers in Columbus, Ohio, served on the committee that selected Keith’s book for Indies Introduce.
“How the Boogeyman Became a Poet, in my opinion, is required reading," said Liban. “I could spend days analyzing Tony’s writing style and choice of words. This affirming memoir, written in verse, walks the reader through the beautiful journey of being honest with yourself and fostering community. This book is for anyone trying to put the puzzle pieces of their life together, but feel like they are missing just one piece.”
Here, Keith and Liban discuss How the Boogeyman Became a Poet.
Maryan Liban: The intentionality in your writing style is extremely profound and brilliant. In many ways, this book is a snapshot of your life. The reader is able to get a window into your world as you were coming to understand your place in it. As a poet, you not only beautifully weave your story with your poems from high school — you allow the reader to follow you on this journey of becoming. Why did you center your old poems in the way you did to carry us through the chapters of your life?
Tony Keith, Jr.: First, thank you so much for that beautiful affirmation. In fact, I included my older poems for that exact same reason: to affirm. I was afraid back then, that how I came out in the world, and who I am, was somehow wrong. But my poems served as evidence of my humanity, and I wanted to provide readers with some kind of “proof” to contextualize my stories about discovering love, joy, and freedom. I thought about folks who might also be creating poems for themselves as a way to make sense of — and to-cope with — the realities of their complicated lives. I want them to feel affirmed on the page too.
ML: Navigating the world with such multi-layered identities (Black, Queer, and low-income) it’s no surprise the world was not accepting of you, nor were you of yourself. How did you find refuge in poetry amidst your identity? How did it serve as a symbolic act of resistance and resilience?
TK: Poetry was, and still is, my way of figuring out what’s going on in my world. In the book, I share how spending time with my poems was like therapy sessions that I saw white folks go to in the movies, except I was the only person counseling my emotions sans couch and an expensive hourly rate. I believe writing metaphors about feeling anxious, confused, sad, and angry was an organic and healthy practice of resisting racism, classism, and heterosexism that silences voices like mine. I could safely, secretly, and quietly put on the page what I could not say out loud. That process not only made me more aware of my voice, but helped me develop my identity as a poet. Plus, the positive responses from audiences after my performances improved my self-esteem and strengthened my confidence as a writer and performer.
ML: Throughout the book, there are many references to the boogeyman. At first, it is a tool to suppress one’s self, create self-doubt, and invite shame. But eventually, the boogeyman shapeshifts and evolves as you grow into your sexuality. How did you come to use the boogeyman analogy to come to terms with your identity as a Black Gay youth?
TK: The last line in the epilogue is “...and so the Boogeyman became a poet”, which comes from a poem I wrote several years ago after talking to a friend — also a gay Black man, who called me for some cheering up. After we spoke, I reflected on the page what it feels like to desire love and greatness, but not believe that you are deserving or worthy. I wanted to express a counter-story to the negative self-talk we can tell ourselves sometimes. And since most of my poems are for me first, that ending line was a reminder that I too, am amazing, bright and brilliant. So, I decided to write my memoir as an answer to the essential question: how did the Boogeyman become a poet? I wanted to know how I came to be unafraid of — and unapologetic about — who I am. It wasn’t until I was midway through writing the book when I had an “aha!” moment and realized what the Boogeyman was really about. Then, I knew I would weave “It” throughout the book as an anchoring metaphor.
ML: As a first-generation college graduate, I love how you walk the reader through your college journey. From the application process to navigating freshman year, it’s clear that structural barriers play a role in the quality of one's college experience. It’s both powerful and validating how you open this conversation as a minority student attending a Predominantly White Institution (PWI). What lesson do you want the reader to take away from your experience as a first-generation minority student?
TK: I hope readers understand the value of having cultural centers, diverse faculty and staff, and student organizations that represent communities of color at PWI’s, is that they function as places and spaces for belonging on campus and in the classroom. In the book I share my experience learning about the histories of Black Student Unions (BSU) and participating in open mic events and poetry slams. I needed to be around people who looked like me. Those moments helped me develop a positive Black identity, and reinforced the “knowledge of self” philosophy I gained through my first year at an HBCU. In a way, they helped me battle the Boogeyman disguised as internalized racism.
ML: I really enjoy how you included your friendships and relationships in the memoir. It is clear that your friends were your anchor. It made me reflect on the community and how to foster it throughout adolescence. What advice do you have for teens trying to find their tribe?
TK: I am still very close friends with several characters in this book, especially Tiffy, Ebby, and Blu. In fact, Blu did the cover art! What holds these relationships together, is unconditional love and acceptance, and a genuine recognition of each other’s humanity. We care about each other’s health and well being. We celebrate small and large victories. We only speak of positivity, joy, and prosperity for one another. We are teammates with a freedom to be our most authentic selves around each other. We charge — not drain — each other’s batteries.
How the Boogeyman Became a Poet by Tony Keith, Jr. (Katherine Tegen Books, 9780063296008, Hardcover Young Adult Memoir, $19.99) On Sale: 2/6/2024.
Ed Emcee Tony Keith wants young people to use the power of creativity to banish their Boogeyman
By Danielle Buckingham
February 08, 2024 at 3:21 pm CST
Author of "How the Boogeyman Became a Poet" Tony Keith (Tony Keith/Illustration / Abbey Crain Art / Courtesy of Tony Keith)
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In a world that has consistently tried to dim the light of Black children, author, poet and educator, Tony Keith, found solace in poetry. Keith takes us on his journey trying to outrun the shadow of his deepest fears as a young Black gay boy in his YA memoir-in-verse, “How the Boogeyman Became a Poet.” This book is one about the self-discovery that happens on the pages of a notebook and beneath the bright lights of a stage. It is a lyrical love letter to Black Queer kids everywhere and a reminder that fear is only as powerful as you make it.
Keith spoke with Black Joy to share the story behind bringing his memoir to life, the role of hip-hop in his work and words of encouragement for young people.
Why did you choose this particular form for your memoir?
Because writing a YA memoir-in-verse was never the original intention of this book. So here’s the story of how that happened. Well, February 2020 I’m at the University of South Carolina with my dear friend and brother Jason Reynolds. And we’re doing some workshops and school visits and things together through a partnership we have there with the Museum of Education. After every event we do, of course, there’s this massive book signing and I’m used to sitting next to Jason for the book signing things. Well, this kid gets out of line. Little Black boy, I swear, looks just like me—him, and I believe his mom, came to me and he goes, “Tony, where’s your book?” And so I remember I was like, “I don’t have a book. I publish on the stage,” something really silly. And I go back to my hotel room that night and I’m like, “What could I write that would be for a young reader?” I had just defended my dissertation a few months before in October 2019.
I didn’t know that the moment we flew back [home], COVID-19 would hit. And so then it’s like, “Well, I’m an artist, I’m an educator. This is the worst time to be an artist and an educator. I’ve got nothing to do but maybe to work on this book.” And so then, began the journey of writing this thing. . . when I acquired my literary agent, what sort of drew her in was the poetic way that I was writing this dissertation about being an Ed Emcee for young readers. She was like, “Tony, there’s something about the way you’re talking about yourself as a little gay Black poor boy in this, perhaps you’re writing a memoir in critical essays, something like Kiese Laymon or Cathy Park Hong or Claudia Rankin. And so I’m reading these people’s books. I think maybe I could write something like this.
So long story short, it took two years for me to figure out that the thing that I naturally was writing was a memoir-in-verse. I didn’t have the language for it. I had to read and read and read and it wasn’t until I read “The Poet X” by Elizabeth Acevedo, “Chlorine Sky” by Mahogany Browne and when I read “Everybody Looking” by Candace Iloh, I was like, I know exactly what I’m gonna do. It was just the light bulb clicked on.
I really like that you incorporated photocopies of pages from your old journal. What was it like revisiting those poems from your childhood and using them to frame the memoir?
I’m gonna talk about therapy because at the time I was enrolled in Talkspace therapy, I had like the little app on my phone, and this is important, especially when you think about the title of “How the Boogeyman Became a Poet” and where those poems came from. The emotions that I experienced as a kid: the sadness, the anger, the confusion—it wasn’t that they were bottled up so much because I wrote about them in the poems. But what’s wild is I continued to carry those poems with me into my adulthood, I literally kept them in a box. And so, here I am, almost 40 years old and I’m dealing with all the COVID-19 and I’m newly married and there was just like a lot of stuff coming up out of me. And my therapist said, “Tony, remember you said you’ve been carrying around this box hoarding all these poems? Maybe you should check those out and see what’s going on.”
And, oh, my gosh, I spent a weekend, like two or three days, and I opened up that box and I read through every single one of those handwritten poems from my youth and I cried. I laughed a lot because I was like, oh God, I was so funny. I was such a funny little kid. I was also surprised and shocked at, honestly, how good some of them were. I’m like, “Tony, you know, there was a thing going on with your rhythm and your rhyming.” And so some of them I ripped apart, some of them I threw in the trash. It was a ceremonial, spiritual kind of moment of healing where I was like, wow, I’ve been carrying this little boy around with all his poems. I’ve been carrying him. It’s time to free him out. And so that’s how it happened.
And so when it came to which poems to include — shout out to my editor Ben Rosenthal — I wanted to include so much and he says, “Whatever memories or moments that don’t necessarily answer the question of how the boogeyman became a poet are probably the things that you don’t need to include.” And so that became for me an easy way to figure out what poems I would put in this book because they really kind of anchor that story. I approached writing this book very much, like I approached writing my dissertation, writing it to answer a question. It was a reflective activity.
Can you tell me a little bit about your work as a hip-hop educational leader? What does that look like?
So I’ll start first with language because for much of my life, when people ask me who I was or what I did, I would always give them the title of where I worked. I would say I’m director of programs at such and such nonprofit or I’m an assistant professor and I do poetry. And I know the connection to hip-hop and poetry is brewed in the emcee element. . . Most rappers start off as poets. That’s just the thread. And so, I’m 42 years old. We celebrated 50 years of hip-hop last year. I don’t know a world without hip-hop in it. So for me, it’s like I’m bringing hip-hop just in my way of being my embodiment of who I am, my culture, my language.
So I knew that there was this embodiment of hip-hop culture that was taking place within educational spaces because I wasn’t the only person. I also knew there was several of us that were poets or rappers or emcees. But we were using, you know, our rhythmic words to move crowds. I know hundreds of us and yet none of us had language to really say who we are and what we do. And so for my dissertation research, I interviewed 10 people who I knew were just like me all around the country. And I’m like, “How did you come to be someone who is a poet or spoken word artist or rapper or emcee working in education? How did you come to be this person?” And within those stories, I’m able to discover this language, Educational Emcee. I found a way to transform these interviews into poems, which is really cool. And I performed the poems.
Anyway, this guy says, “I never called myself a rapper. I was always a poet. Rap is literally poetry timed. I’m an emcee. Emcees become educators letter wise” . . . And I was like, Emcees become educators and I was like, oh educational emcee . Ed Emcee. I’m an Ed Emcee. This is the language. This is the thing and the light bulb just popped on. And so for me, if you ask me who I am, what I do, I’m an Ed Emcee.
I move crowds in education with these rhythmic spoken words. And I’m not the only one which is why I created a company called Ed Emcee Academy and it’s helping to employ other Ed Emcees to be folks who go into schools and communities and libraries and work with teachers and run workshops. And we focus so much on belonging, equity and justice from a poetry and hip hop perspective. So that’s what that looks like, it’s me bringing hip-hop and spoken word into educational spaces specifically so that marginalized and oppressed young people and adults feel seen and heard.
What advice do you have for young people trying to outrun the shadow of their own boogeyman?
The first thing I’m thinking about is, you gotta write about it or speak about it. Make art about it. Sing about it. Draw about it. There’s gotta be a way that you’ve gotta get that fear into a tangible medium that you can, I don’t think the word is manipulate, but that you have access to so that it’s no longer living in you. If I didn’t write those poems as a kid and kept all of that in me, I don’t think that I would be here. So, for those young people, it’s like, yo, you gotta get it out, you gotta get that out some kind of way and it may not look like tears, it may not look like screaming. It may look like dance. It may look just like breathing. It may look like reading, but you gotta get it out.
And also, know that God don’t make mistakes and I don’t say this in like the biblical [or] Christian [way], I mean, The Universe, the being of it all, why the planet is rotating, all that does not make any mistakes and there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong.
Before we end, did you have anything else you wanted to add or just anything else you want to share?
One thing I will add is, in addition to the language emcee or educational emcee to describe people like me, hip-hop education leadership is a theory I developed because at the time when I was working on my dissertation, there were no leadership theories in education that talked about people like me. And so I was the one who was like, “Yo, if we pair hip-hop with education leadership, there’s this theory.” Now hip-hop education leadership ain’t just for emcees. You could look at hip-hop education leadership in DJs, graffiti artists, break dancers, people who embody other aspects of hip-hop culture. I just focus on the emcees.
And the last thing is, I just want the world to know how excited I am. This is a real thing. This is my debut book and I loved putting this thing together. This was a joy project. This was not cumbersome, I didn’t hate it. I loved writing this book. It’s like when people put love in your food, you know what I mean? And they eat it. I want y’all to know that when you read it. I want you to feel that there’s a lot of love in there.
How the Boogeyman Became a Poet. By Tony Keith Jr. Feb. 2024. 352p. HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen, $19.99 (9780063296008). Gr. 9-12.811.6.
In this free-verse memoir, author Keith goes back to his senior year of high school, a time when he was a closeted gay African American teen attending public school in Washington, DC. Despite working two jobs, Keiths single mother barely made enough to keep their household going, and Keith wore hand-me-downs and cheap knockoffs. He was short, small, and totally nonathletic, but he got good grades, sang in his church choir, and had a girlfriend and a small group of close friends. Keith was also really good at writing poetry. His poetic prowess becomes evident as this first-person story unfolds and his marvelously expressive lines fly across pages. His interior monologue exposes his thoughts, conflicts, desires, and emotions as Keith documents taking his SATs and applying for college, tackles senioritis, and shares his tentative explorations of his sexual identity. The book only covers about two years of Keith's life, but his searing honesty and deft wordplay create a vivid impression of this enormously talented and multifaceted writer and performer. Teens will relate to Keith's story and celebrate his conquering of the Boogeyman: his own doubts and fears. --Kathleen McBroom
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
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McBroom, Kathleen. "How the Boogeyman Became a Poet." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 9-10, 1 Jan. 2024, p. 50. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A780973458/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7f99ed3e. Accessed 14 June 2024.
Keith Jr., Tony HOW THE BOOGEYMAN BECAME A POET Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins (Teen None) $19.99 2, 6 ISBN: 9780063296008
In this memoir in verse, a gay, Black spoken-word artist, poet, and hip-hop educator recollects parts of his becoming.
At his high school in Prince George's County, Maryland, where he was known as "the man with the poems," Keith was already a self-assured young writer: "I was thirteen when the first poem burst in my atmosphere like dat." Mystified by a feeling of sadness, he responded by writing a poem. After being placed in the gifted and talented track, he's critiqued by a "miserable" English teacher who doesn't appreciate his strengths. Though writing poetry keeps Keith afloat emotionally, grappling with his sexuality is a different story altogether. He's attracted to boys but hasn't shared this openly and feels angst over feeling "obligated to act out a prescriptive performance every day" and to follow an expected script while attempting to see a way through to the other side of his accumulated fears. The poems flow into one another and are occasionally broken up with photos from his childhood and youth, images of his handwritten poems, and instant message chats, all of which enhance readers' experiences of the book. Keith offers a vulnerability within these pages that's reminiscent of George M. Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue (2020) and Candice Iloh's Every Body Looking (2020) and will especially speak to young people who are dealing with similar educational, familial, and interpersonal pressures.
An emotionally honest and self-reflective debut. (Verse memoir. 14-18)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Keith Jr., Tony: HOW THE BOOGEYMAN BECAME A POET." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A774415223/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0df695f4. Accessed 14 June 2024.