Exclusive Interview: Lyrical Faith

Where did your pen name come from, and what does it represent for you as an artist?

So first of all, thank you for inviting me. And secondly, what a wonderful question. I love this question.

I grew up in the Bronx, New York. I grew up pretty close to—if not the exact neighborhood as—Hip Hop Boulevard, which is what it’s called now, but essentially the neighborhood where hip hop was founded in the West Bronx. Throughout my entire life, I’ve been very into hip hop culture, hip hop music, and I was even writing raps and rhymes before I found poetry—always very entranced by that culture.

Now, as an adult, I also study Hip Hop education and implement it as a researcher. It’s something that’s always stayed with me. Lyrics have always been a huge aspect of who I am, what I do, and how I engage with the world around me.

This was in college—sometime between 2012 and 2014—when I was thinking about what I wanted my stage name to be (that seemed popular in the early 2010s). I was thinking about what felt all-encompassing to my persona as an artist, my work, my life, and what I want to represent. “Lyrical” came from my love for lyrics, and “Faith” is the Swahili translation of my birth name, but also representative of how I engage and move through the world as a woman of faith. I felt “Lyrical Faith” was a name that allowed me to express my inner artistic voice. It stuck, and the rest is history.

How does your spiritual identity shape your creative choices and the way you move through the world?

Absolutely. As a Christian, I am very much in a season—and have been through many seasons—of thinking about how my faith is integral to my artistry, and my artistry is integral to my faith. I believe the two are intertwined. I believe that God has given me this gift on purpose, because God knew I was someone who wanted to be able to speak to people and impact people in a certain way, and this was the talent He chose to give me.

I take that very seriously; I don’t take it lightly. I want to continue to use my voice, my messages, and my love for the craft and the art form to speak to people and express myself in ways I thought unimaginable. Before finding poetry, I was someone who felt very silenced and didn’t really have a voice that people wanted to listen to. Poetry gave me a platform where it didn’t matter who didn’t want to listen to me—what mattered was who did—and that turned out to be a lot of people. So yeah.

In “Wade in the Martyr” and elsewhere, how do you decide what personal experiences to share while speaking to a larger collective story? Are there narratives you consciously include or exclude to keep that balance?

Yeah, of course. Wade in the Martyr is one of my favorite poem-writing experiences. It took me a pretty decent amount of time to write. Shout out to my coach at the time, Anthony McPherson, who was the primary person I worked with throughout the writing process. He coached the poem, provided ideas and inspiration, and pointed me toward background research—things I had to do on my own to really embody and understand some of the poem’s themes. He was a huge motivator throughout slamming the piece for several years.

It took about 12 pages of research: my own Google doc where I looked at everything I could find online around inequality within the women’s rights movement—the women’s rights struggle—and how Black women’s struggles have existed for centuries before anybody cared or paid attention, often swept under the rug, whereas when white women started speaking up, suddenly everyone cared. That’s essentially what the poem is about.

Roe v. Wade, in and of itself, is such a polarizing topic in today’s society. I wrote the poem around 2022, when overturning Roe v. Wade was within the Supreme Court’s hemisphere—everyone was rallying and fearing its loss. I wrote within the energy of that time period; the Court ended up overturning it, and everything that happened after happened after. A few years later, here we are in a Trump presidency again. History repeats itself and stays relevant when you write about uplifting marginalized voices and identities—particularly policies that affect Black people, and especially Black women.

So Wade in the Martyr continues to tell itself. As a Black woman, I’m well-versed in how the women’s equality and equity struggles have differed for Black women historically and today compared to white women. Even with women’s suffrage—voting rights—Black women were on the lines advocating but didn’t get those rights until long after white women. Did white women get back in the protest lines and say, “Hey, Black women still need these rights”? We have always been the bottom of the barrel in the fight for rights and equality, no matter the political issue. We fight for it, and when it doesn’t turn out our way, nobody wants to fight for us, though we fought for everyone else.

This poem is an American story—about history and the raw, authentic emotions Black women have endured day in and day out to the present. My identity is intertwined with that: understanding the weight of that struggle, how I have to fit into society, process it, and give voice to it through my writing.

In that piece you write, “We have no choice but to midwife their movement,” referring to white feminists newly affected by the reversal of Roe v. Wade. How do you envision true allyship—what should co-conspirators do?

My vision of allyship in these spaces—yes, thank you for that line. Once again, like I said, I was working with a brilliant coach at that time on this poem. Shout out to my coach, Anthony McPherson, for the editing and support.

“Midwife their movement”—the line explains itself. We have to be this middle person in the movement. And what happens to the middle person? They get lost in the sauce. We have to be the messenger, the conduit—the carrier of the struggle—without necessarily experiencing the fruits of our labor.

How do I envision allyship? I think Bettina Love said it best: we don’t need allyship; we need co-conspiratorship—where white people utilize their privilege to leverage how Black people can receive some of that privilege. They put themselves on the line so people less privileged than them can benefit.

It’s like my other poem, “Seven Lessons Learned at the Protest.” The first line is, “Let the white people get in front.” At protests, who comes to the front? Police officers trying to stop protesters. When police come to the front and white people are there, officers are less likely to put their hands and weapons on white people than Black people. These are statistics—historical facts. Because of that, Black people can be in the march and not get hurt, while white people use their privilege to fend off harm coming toward Black people present.

So allyship is co-conspiratorship. Generations of harm and tragedy have been inflicted on the Black community and on the activists on the front lines fighting for everyone’s equality, including ours. We often see other forms of equality taking place but not the full rights we’ve advocated for. Economically, so many groups have received reparations; Black people are still—half in jest but truly—asking, “Where are the 40 acres and a mule?” which were literally promised for the plight of chattel slavery.

I envision privileged people—white people—truly interested in being part of the struggle for equity who use their positions to say, “Hey, this Black person is being treated unfairly here,” on a one-to-one level, and also at the legislative level. Certain people of power and privilege won’t be attacked the same way Black people in those positions are. Plenty of members of Congress and senators will speak out and say the most racist, denigrating things on certain issues. Then Jasmine Crockett speaks up—straight facts supported by statistics and research—and gets told publicly to “tread lightly,” as though she doesn’t have the same freedom of speech as those saying harmful things.

These are the realities for people of color, Black people, and minoritized identities in America. My hope is that my poetry sheds light on these issues—sparking conversations and bigger ideas in the atmosphere about what people are truly trying to say and what they’re grappling with. Poetry is a conduit of truth-telling, and spoken word is a conduit of storytelling by way of truth. It lets us raise awareness about things people often don’t want to hear or deal with in regular conversation.

When you want a poem to provoke immediate action or feeling, what does your craft process look like—from research to mentorship to performance?

I try to—this is something I grappled with in college while coming up with my stage name and artistic persona. I had an amazing mentor in college, Cedric T. Bolton, director of the poetry program Verbal Blend at Syracuse University, where I did my undergrad. My time in Verbal Blend, under Cedric’s mentorship, was truly transformative.

Those were my early slam years, being exposed to slam at a really competitive level. I kept thinking about what I want people to receive when they hear me get on that stage—what I expect them to receive when I perform.

I was a Public Relations major and a Sociology minor. Sociology was truly groundbreaking for me. It led me to the degrees I pursued later and where I am now with social justice—it was my first exposure. I thought about how passionate I was about these issues: the issues I acknowledged in the community and education system I grew up in, the schools I went to. If I’m going off to college and doing all these things with my artistry—“making it big” by leaving my neighborhood and doing this thing that’s hard to do—then what am I giving back to the spaces I’ve come from? How am I honoring the shoulders I stand on—my mother and grandmother, both advocates for education (my grandmother was an educator), who set the pathway for undergrad, then a master’s, who pushed my mom, who pushed me?

So if God has given me this platform and the opportunity to stand in front of crowds and win competitions, I need to take it seriously and think about how what I’m saying helps someone think differently about issues I care about.

In undergrad (2012–2016)—very interesting years—Trayvon Martin was murdered right before I went to college. That was huge for Millennials. We saw ourselves in Trayvon; he was literally my age—his birthday is about four days from mine. It felt like it could have been any of us. That’s scary. These stories go viral; it becomes scary to go outside. Your timeline becomes traumatizing. Then you go to work or class, sitting next to white kids living their best lives, and you’re like, “There are two Americas.” You have no idea what I’m going through psychologically, acting like everything is normal when someone who looks like me was murdered in cold blood in broad daylight.

I wrote about that. In 2013, George Zimmerman was acquitted for Trayvon Martin’s murder. I’ll never forget that day—July 13, 2013, if I’m not mistaken. I was at a barbecue; folks checked their phones—breaking news. The energy went from buzzing and popping to sad. Another turning point: we hit the streets. We protested, yelled, screamed, cried. The Black Lives Matter movement started in response to the acquittal.

Over and over: 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson. I wrote a poem about that. We did protests and die-ins on our campus and in our library. I wanted to use my voice—as a pathway to enlighten, to speak out, to react, to critique, to respond and say, “We are not okay, and I’m not going to be silent. My voice matters. My life matters. I’m going to tell you exactly how I feel.”

What topics or stories do you feel remain under-explored in society—or in the arts and spoken word specifically?

Oh man, that’s a hard question. I almost feel like there’s nothing new under the sun—that people have written about almost everything. It’s how you decide to talk about it, and what perspective or angle you take, that makes it new, fresh, and original.

There’s news every single day, so there’s always something to talk about, advocate for, or respond to—especially today, with chaos, confusion, and an executive order seemingly signed every day that takes away more rights. As we continue along this path of what the current world is handing us, it’s important we continue to use our voices to speak out.

I think Senator Cory Booker—who made history yesterday by delivering the longest speech, over 24 hours (I believe it was 25), breaking the record—used his voice to make history in a way that spoke out for the rights of the marginalized, rights being taken away: Medicaid being taken away, the people affected, the fear. He broke the record of a racist, segregationist Southern senator from the 1960s, who spoke a little over 24 hours against civil rights. Booker said, “No—this is my time to speak out about what’s happening now, and I’m going to break the record that once stood for speaking against racism,” because that cannot be the precedent or standard.

In this day and age, there is much to explore, as we’re making history every day. It’s the artists’, creatives’, poets’, and performers’ responsibility to be the griots of our time and continue to tell these stories. Personally, I think every time you step to your pen and paper—and then to the stage—if you’re telling the truth, being authentic, being vulnerable, and leaving as much of yourself on the page as you can, you’re exploring a topic people need to hear.