poetry party. So everybody brought a pie. For poetry I had Dina, who’s awesome. Deena, an Illuminate graduate as well, won first place in the Illuminate slam last year for her age group. She was my opener, and Jamii, my poetry mentor, did some poetry, it was really cool. So that, and booking gigs and doing this later on at the Louder Than A Bomb. I may be the sacrificial poet, who’s just the poet who goes after the actual slam, just to give the judges a basepoint on how they want to grade.
onto cardstock. I’ve sold a couple... And I’m currently making one for one of my friends, Aalia Mohamad, a Know Allegiance Nation intern, which is an organization that Illuminate and two other programs are under. I’m doing one for her mom.
LC: This organization sounds wonderful, you guys have classes when? ZK: Class is on Friday in the summer. The graduates of Illuminate also get together so we can keep our skills polished... We have a bi-monthly meeting.
LC: I think you anwered it, but can you tell us a little more about what emotion you write about?
LC: Tell me a little more about the people involved.
ZK: Any emotion would just be that, not just only me, but that we’re here, and that we won’t be quiet and that we have a voice and that we know how to use it, and we have education, and we’re literate. We know how to utilize our voice and our words, and bring upon message, and empower not only listeners, but us through our voices.
LC: What about chapbooks? ZK: We were in class one day and Jamii Tata encourages us to hone in on the ability to properly be an entrepreneur, and to take what you learned as a poet and to apply it to the business realm, live off of it. It’s so often you hear, I’m a starving artist. And that’s something really important that Jamii teaches us. So we’re sitting in class one day and he was like okay today is about chapbooks. He took a blank piece of paper and folded it a certain way and he told us write your poem on it. So we wrote our poems and make it look nice. It was just a simple piece of copy paper. I like art so I went home and I went all out. I got cardstock, thick watercolor paper, two sheets of it and folded it in half. The first one wasn’t even intentionally for like selling, I was making it for a super special friend who introduced me to Illuminate, Yakuza Moon, a.k.a Khafre. So I got some cool pen markers from Blick in Midtown, and I did some cool edging on the paper, and I did an elephant design. I went all out.I calligraphed all my poems. I felt cool, I felt like a boss. So I showed Jamii, and he said, sell them. And I was like no, but he said sell it. So I stitched together one, stitched the spine, so it looked like a book. And that’s sort of how the chapbook started. And all of them are handmade. The second one I did was butterfly, it was a pattern almost. It was a little different, you know. Incorporating all the different kinds of creativity, you know the art and the poetry. The entrepreneur thought of it, it just bring something cool with it?
LC: Nice. Did you sell any of them? ZK: Yeah. What I do is I make a master copy, then I copy them
ZK: We have Aalia Mohamad, she’s awesome. She’s a writer, and you have 11 year olds. We have this one kid—I’m sorry, woman. She’s super young, Aziza, as tall as a table, and she is a powerhouse. And she always holds her own. But it’s kind of embarrassing to have like 11 year olds against 17 year olds. And it’s not that they can’t keep up, but you have to judge on two different things, so the score is kind of wacky. So we split it up into age groups, but now that we have Aalia, there will be a an Illuminate that’s called the Nighlights and that’s from ages 7-12. Then the age 13-18 group is called the Illuminate Entrepreneurs.
LC: How has this organization helped address illiteracy problems in Detroit? ZK: it’s never just literacy, it’s never just poetry with Illuminate, with Jamii, with Know Allegiance Nation. it’s a tool. This is what it’s called. This is it’s impact. This is how you use it. This is how it’s been used throughout history, and so much more. So just being less ignorant to the world in general through the discussions we have and the current events we talk about. It helps me further educate myself and peers around me. I go to my little brother and say well this is what this word means, and here’s your word for the day and, so just getting in the practice of sharing the knowledge on a more consistent basis, I feel has made an impact.
LC: Do you feel that you have benefitted as much from the classes as the paid performances? ZK: Absolutely... At my school talent show, I knew, when I got on the stage, people were waiting to hear me speak. And as I got older I got quieter, I needed to learn humility. That was a big lesson I needed to learn. I’m learning that being an introvert, and needing to learn humility, there’s a middle ground. And the middle ground is where I’m getting to now in this stage of life. So my paid gigs have helped me to learn that it gave me the
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