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.
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?
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
