The Sidewalk Motel: Poems from a Poverty Skola and PoShunary (the Po’ People’s Dictionary)

At age 11, me and my mama became houseless, and I had to drop out of formal institutions of learning. I enrolled full-time in the skoo of hard knocks to survive, where my Xingona warrior, indigenous, disabled, poverty skola Mama Dee was my writing teacher. Mama was a G and not user-friendly or easy on me, but she was insistent that the AristoKrazy didn’t own writing, history, art, poetry, theory and storytelling and that it was extremely important for poor and houseless, uneducated people like us to take that lie back and write powerful poetry and prose about our struggles and our lives. This is for you, Mama-I miss you everyday.