My name is Kevin Powell and I am a writer, I am an artist. I say this with great pride, today, because I have not felt this sort of thing for many years, until the middle of this decade, to be mad honest. You see, I have known I wanted to be a writer since I was a child, kept it to myself because in the world in which I was born, given my name, and told, almost immediately, what I could and could not do, who I could and could not be, there were no examples for poor people like me to be an artist, to be a writer. Or at least it was never told, not to me. So: I buried my dream of being a writer and guarded my imagination closely, except for those days in our Jersey City, New Jersey, tenement where I would speak aloud, as my mother went about her business, of my “friends” who were not there, of the countless characters I imitated from our broken-down television set. From where did I get that imagination and that love of storytelling? Why, my ma, of course, she of the American South, the Low Country of South Carolina: folks who are and speak in a beautiful, tongue-twisting dialect they call Geechee. My mother’s stories captivated me, then, now, regardless of how many times I heard them, because they were a story of people, of a people who had done nothing that bad to be so black and blue, yet they were. And it was my ma who took me, when I was eight years old, to the Greenville Public Library on John F. Kennedy Boulevard in Jersey City, and allowed me to roam free, to find myself, my imagination, my voice, amongst those dusty books with the strange titles. As my voice changed and my height grew I would come to inhale the words of Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, S. E. Hinton—writers who fed me, fed my American hunger for adventure, for escape, for a better life than what I had. And thus a writer I became, eventually, like for real, at Henry Snyder High School when my twelfth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Lillian Williams, spotted something in the way I wrote and encouraged me to enter a city-wide essay contest. I won, at age seventeen, the only thing I had ever won in my life, except for a few medals as a track runner. I was shocked, proud, felt alive in a way I could not express, in those innocent days, as a woefully shy teenager with a bad temper and dangerously low self-esteem. By age twenty, while a full-time student on a financial aid package at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, as they call it, I was not only writing for various campus newspapers but also commuting from Central Jersey to New York City collecting my first paychecks as a professional writer. That young Kevin said as he raced to the top of the world: I am on a mission and in a hurry. In my early twenties I enlisted in the army of fearless and idealistic poets in New York spitting our hastily scribbled words here there everywhere; by my mid-twenties I was writing cover stories for Quincy Jones’s Vibe magazine, and at that publication I would also document the life and times of Tupac Shakur; and on behalf of Rolling Stone magazine I was there in Las Vegas when ’Pac tragically died at twenty-five. As for me, by age thirty I was burnt out, a has-been, a drunk, suicidal, dazed and confused about what to do with myself as a writer, contemplating on many a night how my rites of passage had swung so wildly between great success and embarrassing failure—
No one said the walk of a writer would ever be easy. . . .
All these years later I present to you this, my thirteenth book, a collection of thirteen essays—blogs—written over the past couple of years, yes, but really reflecting much of what I have experienced and learned since I was that puny kid-writer so many chapters ago. It is called My Mother. Barack Obama. Donald Trump. And the Last Stand of the Angry White Man. because my mother has been very sick for the past two years (and because we have a very complicated relationship); because Barack Obama changed history, but, then again, he did not; and because Donald Trump has ushered in a wave of hatred and venom and violence that is new but is also not new. These things have been deeply etched in my mind, and I’ve had a flurry of writing gush like a volcano from my spirit in a way I have not since the 1990s. And I have digested the reactions to what I have penned the past few months, via email, via social media, after my speeches, in random spaces. I feel I have found my voice again, one that was lost for long stretches, save my autobiography—The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey into Manhood—which was a monumental struggle to produce before this collection. Indeed, that autobiography, so stressful to relive, so traumatic in getting it out of me, took up seven years of my life. But then I was free, because I told the truth, my truths, without fear, and without care of who would read it or what they might say.
So here I stand, today, an utterly grateful man married to an amazing woman; I am a skateboarder and a hiker, a two-time New York City Marathon runner, and I am also a vegan and a yogi long ago done with alcohol and those other things far too many of us writers absorb and do, as if sabotaging or destroying ourselves will somehow make us better writers, greater artists. No. . . . I am not interested in what I call slow suicide, nor do I feel one has to be miserable or in constant rage or pain or chaos to create one’s art. Been there, done that, I am good. These days I am a very different human being, in what I hope are merely the middle years of my life, writing with a great sense of urgency, about race, about manhood and gender and gender identity, about class, about mental health, about politics and social issues, about popular culture, about sports, about violence and hate, about love and peace, about our America, which is precisely why the context of this book is that it is an autobiography of America. If I can turn the mirror on myself, then we all must make an effort to do the same. I remain a woefully imperfect, hypersensitive, and battered human being, but I am not afraid to say that about myself, or about us, or this country, or this planet. What I said many years ago, I say again this moment: I am on a mission and in a hurry. What I said many years ago, I say again this moment: I only wanted to see my name, my byline, in a magazine or newspaper or on the cover of a book one time. Anything beyond that is more than I could have ever imagined, or expected, given where I come from. What I said many years ago, I say again this moment: Writing is as important to me as breathing. What I said many years ago, I say again this moment: I just want to be a good man, a good writer, a good helper, and a good servant to others. And I just want us all to be free, truly free. That is my prayer, that is my dream, and that will never change. . . .