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.