April 4, 2023 • 40 mins
In honor of 404 Day, an annual celebration of Atlanta’s culture and achievements, I’m waxing poetic about what brought me to ATL and why I’m still proud to call it home. Listen in for my Atlanta origin story and what I hope for Atlanta’s future.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:30):
Hey, everybody, welcome back to a new episode of Her
with Amina Brown. And I have been having Matt here
and some guests here, but now it's just us. It's
just me and y'all, So thank you wherever you're listening from.
And today, the day that this episode releases, is considered
(00:52):
four oh four Day in Atlanta, which is a day
that has lots of events and celebrations related to how
much so many of us loved the city and love
the culture here, and so I thought it would be
cool in celebration of four or four Day to talk
about why I love Atlanta and why it has been
home to me for so many years. So thank you
(01:12):
for joining me in the living room. Let us talk
about my home city and why it's amazing. So first
question is why did I move to Atlanta? I guess
I should also answer, and when I moved to Atlanta
to go to college. I moved here in nineteen ninety eight, y'all.
I just can't believe it was that long ago. And
(01:34):
when I was applying to college, I'm not sure if
I talked about this in detail on the podcast before,
but when I was applying to college, Spellman was my
number one choice. I had wanted to go to Spellman
since I was nine years old. My mom was a
nurse in the Army, and she introduced me to a
pediatrician that she worked with. And my mom would do
(01:56):
this type of thing periodically, just you know, if she
awesome one that she thought it would be good for
me or my sister to know. She would do whatever
she could to just expose us to different people, different professions,
different things that could potentially be helpful to us in
the future. And so she introduced me to doctor Stephanie,
(02:16):
a friend of hers also, and doctor Stephanie took me
in her office. I remember this part, but I can't
remember and my mom can't remember what it was I
talked about when I went in doctor Stephanie's office. My
mom just said, at nine years old, I walked out
and told my mom that I was going to Spellman.
So I've had dreams of going to Spellman for a
(02:38):
long time. And to be clear, I was going to
junior high in high school in the nineties. So there
were a lot of different ways to be encouraged to
go to an HBCU and to be encouraged to go
to Atlanta, to go to an HPCU. So back then
there was a magazine called Young Sisters and Brothers Magazine YSB,
(03:02):
and every year, the same way that a lot of
magazines will do, like the top colleges in the nation,
ys B would do that, but for historically black schools.
And so I remember like taking the page out of
the magazine and like putting it up on my wall.
I don't know if I'm assuming this is still a
teenager thing, that teenagers maybe still do this, but back
(03:24):
then we were still reading magazines, like physical magazines, so
we would take they had posters in them of different
artists you love, and I remember looking at that and
being like, oh, yeah, I really want to go to Spellman.
I want to give a shout out to my friend
Porsche from elementary school. I lived in Silver Spring when
I was in elementary school, and my friend Porsche and
I we were best friends and we just dreamed, dreamed,
(03:47):
dreamed that we would both end up going to Spellman someday.
Even by the time the film Boys in the Hood
came out, like when you get to the end of
the movie and the central characters that Cuba Gooding Junior
and Nia Long played, it had like the epilogue, I
guess of the story, which basically was that Cuba Gooding
Junior's character ended up at Morehouse and Neia Long's character
(04:10):
ended up at Spellman. So it was like I had
this moment with Doctor Stephanie and then all these other
moments as I got older that were definitely like encouraging me,
you know, further pushing me on to come to Spellman.
And I don't think I had considered as much like
what it meant to be coming to Atlanta. I was
(04:30):
definitely thinking about Spellman, thinking about the Atlanta University Center,
which contained at that time Spellman, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College,
Morris Brown College, plus the Interdenominational Theological Center, and Morehouse
School of Medicine. So at that time there were technically
six schools, all historically black colleges and universities, in the
(04:53):
Atlanta University Center. So I thought about just being there
for school. I had attended Howard's homecoming when my mom
and I lived in the DC area, so I really
thought about that. But I really didn't think a lot
about the city. And I'm going to say something that
I would never advise anyone to do, but I did
(05:13):
not tour Spellman before attending there. I actually did not
do a lot of college tours. Now that I think
about it, I think almost all of the schools I
applied to I had never been there. I applied to Spellman,
I applied to Sarah Lawrence College. I applied to Texas
A and M and University of Texas, and I applied
(05:35):
to Clark Atlanta. I never visited any of those schools.
I don't know why. I just don't remember. I just
don't remember us doing that. I don't remember why. But anyway,
I didn't tour schools. I don't recommend that, but I
kind of had my sites set on Spellman. They were
(05:56):
the last acceptance letter that I received, and it was
just like, no contest, Like I'm going there. I was
a part of a wonderful Black church growing up, and
I was already coming from a family that was very
college forward. You know, my grandma really believed in education
for all of her kids, grandkids, great grants, everybody. So
(06:19):
my grandma still to this day, is really big on education.
So going to college really wasn't like if you go
on to college. It was when you go to college,
you'll decide your major. When you go to college. You'll
decide if you're going to pledge when you go to college.
All of it was when you go to college. Nothing
was like I had a choice, and I'm a oldest
(06:39):
kid and a rule follower, so I just went ahead
and went that way. I think I visited Atlanta once
the year before I went to college because I was
a part of the NAACP's act So competition, which I
have talked about on a previous episode here. Because the
NAACP act So competition played a big role into me
(07:02):
really getting into performing my own poetry when I was
a high school student. So I made it to win
our local act Soel competitionist in Antonio, where I was
going to high school, and the national act Soel was
in Atlanta the year before I went to college, so
I got a chance to come to Atlanta. But it's
(07:23):
wild like something happened. I think we actually made it
down to the Atlanta University Center, but something happened where
we weren't able to actually tour any of the colleges
that day. So I actually saw Georgia Tech's campus much
more than I saw Spellman's campus, and there was nothing
(07:46):
that I was going to major end that would have
made me in any way attend Georgia Tech. So that's wild, right,
I saw their campus much more than anything. So anyhow,
I got into Spellman and moved in in August to
nineteen ninety eight. This is a wonderful year for music.
A Quim and I had just come out. The Miseducation
(08:09):
of Lauren Hill had just come out. So my first
semester in Atlanta was full of outcast music, which was
really wonderful. I've been exposed a little bit to outcast
in Texas because I don't personally consider Texas a part
of the South, but I do see how Texas has
(08:32):
sort of like a lot of different layers of culture there,
and I do think Southern culture is present there in
some places. And for those of us who were lovers
of hip hop, we were listening to the other hip
hop that was coming out of the South that seemed
a bit closer to where we lived in Texas culturally
than maybe a lot of the East Coast hip hop did.
(08:52):
So we obviously listened a lot to Master P and
what was coming out of No Limit Records and A
Balling Him, JG. And you know, all of those things,
So all of that was sort of like leading to
also having a little bit of exposure to the music
that was coming out of Atlanta at the time, plus
the boodhy music that was coming out of Florida from
Uncle Luke at the time. So you know, this is
(09:14):
sort of like the cultural era. When I moved to Atlanta,
this was two years post the Olympics, which was a
big time in Atlanta's cultural history because that was for
other people who didn't live here. That was the first
time that people really looked at Atlanta as a world city.
And historically, you're you know, watching Atlanta go through a
(09:35):
lot of changes in the city to get ready for
the Olympics, and you watch the city go through a
whole lot of changes after the Olympics had been here.
Ninety eight was also I believe that was the last
year of Freaknick as we knew it. So I was
sort of moving to the city when the city was
in this interesting flux culturally, but that flux didn't really
(10:04):
touch my experiences in the same way as it would
have people that had been living here a long time.
So I spent my first four years in what was
Southwest Atlanta and back then, if you were from Southwest
Atlanta or grew up there, they would have this phrase.
They would say southwest I think it was Southwest atl
(10:28):
too strong, were the too strong? Or they would call
Southwest swats as sort of this like phrasing around Southwest Atlanta.
So I grew up there, I grew up. Grew up
I mean in a way. Yes, that's probably why it
came out. I didn't mean to say I grew up,
but in a way. Yeah, it's like I was an adult.
(10:48):
But that time between eighteen and twenty two is a
lot of growing up, is a lot of developmental things.
And having that experience in the West End, being at
historically black college that has its own you know, either
ways it is perceived to be elite or has ways
(11:10):
it can participate, you know, in elitism in certain ways,
and being faced with sort of here we were on
this college campus. I mean, I'm in my first two
years of school. I'm reading France Faynone and Beverly Guy
Chef Tall and Edwige, Don Decott and Pearl Clague and
(11:30):
Nikki Giovanni and Tony kay Bambar, Like I'm I am
reading deep, deep into not just the canon of Black
history and black literature, but also reading black women in
so many very specific ways. So you're in this sort
of very like educationally entrenched environment, and then you step
(11:54):
a block or two away from campus and you were
in the hood. Even when you drive to Spellman now
like the way it was when I moved here, it
was very different. Spellman had different like areas around it
that were still the projects, right, So you were readily
able to in the same way that I could be
(12:16):
on campus and be there with all of these other
black women who are on this same you know, collegiate
educational journey that I was on and step two blocks
outside of campus and also see my people who were
just you know, trying to survive and doing whatever they
had to do to make it and to get by.
And so I think that was dissonant in certain regards,
(12:41):
and it was also very connected, you know, in other regards.
So I feel like the first four years it's like,
I don't know, there were times I got to see Atlanta,
Like I probably will have to do a separate episode
since we are beginning National Poetry Month. I'd love to
do a separate episode and talk to y'all about my
(13:02):
first open mic experiences in the city. But my time
in college I did have sometimes that I sort of
broke away from what I was doing for the most part,
which was outside of my schooling. I was involved in
campus ministry and I've talked about that some in other
episodes here. So because I was involved in campus ministry
and very involved in church, that really didn't leave a
(13:25):
whole lot of other time for social activities. I wasn't
dating anyone. But the one thing I was sort of
like escaping away from all of the ministry stuff we
were doing, is I was going to open mics in
the city. I went to open mics on campus, but
most of the open mics I went to when I
was in college were just grown people open mics. They
(13:45):
were not for college students. And I think in a way,
me having had that sort of deep dive into what
spoken word could sound like and to get to experience
that in very black bass was such a gift to me.
I thought it was a gift then and all these
(14:05):
years later, I still feel that way about it. So
I got to experience like a little bit of the
city that way. But you know, for the most part,
I was a student and I wouldn't dating anybody, and
I really didn't experience a whole whole lot of things
outside of like if they weren't poetry related or ministry
related pretty much. So that was what made me move
here to Atlanta. When I graduated from college, which I've
(14:28):
talked about this part in previous episodes, I applied to
grad school. I applied to Georgia State, I applied to
University of Pittsburgh, and I applied to NYU to get
an MFA and poetry. I was denied to all three schools.
So this was one moment that I was in consideration of, like, Okay,
I've been in Atlanta for four years now, I'm about
(14:49):
to leave. And then I didn't get in, so I
had to stay. And then around the time I was
like twenty five or so, I found out about this
ministry program was like a Christian based program where I
don't know better words to you, so I'm going to
(15:09):
use this as a word, but I think in a
way it was sort of like you could kind of
be involved in ministry or missions kind of projects, if
that language makes sense, y'all, But like you could basically
have a year in New York, but you would have
to raise fundage for yourself. It's fundage a word, y'all
(15:31):
that I really you would have to raise funds for
yourself to cover, you know, the cost of you living
in New York for a year. I think the program
had a way that it could somewhat subsidize your housing
or help you find housing that would be you know,
still safe but less expensive, but still you know, it's
in New York. And I had this like fork in
(15:53):
the road right there. Truthfully, I had a fork in
the road when I was in high school because Sarah
Lawrence was, you know, really kind of courting me to
go early decision with them, and those of you that
aren't familiar with that, I'm thinking this still exists, but
it was twenty years ago. So early decision basically meant
(16:15):
you were telling a college like, if you accept me,
I am agreeing that this is the school I'm going
to attend. And I could not do it. I couldn't
go early decision without knowing if I was going to
get into Spellment or not, because I knew if I
said yes to Sarah Lawrence that I would be really
upset to find out I got into Spellment. So I
didn't go early decision Sarah Lawrence and then got waitlisted
(16:36):
when I did get accepted. So that was my first
like fork in the road, isn't New York, isn't Atlanta?
I chose Atlanta. Well, here I am twenty five with
this opportunity to possibly go to New York for a
year or I had this corporate job on the table,
and I decided to stay in Atlanta and still work
the corporate job. I had another time, maybe, like I
(16:59):
don't know, a few years after that, where I was
considering moving to la and I had made a lot
of like connections that just had a lot of relationships
out there, and I just I think I kind of
felt over Atlanta because you know, I just felt like
I'd been here so long, and you know, I was like,
I don't have a family, I'm not dating anybody that
(17:21):
I feel like I need to consider them. You know.
I think the truth was I just wasn't dating anyone.
It wasn't that I wasn't dating someone I had to consider.
I just wasn't dating anyone. That's the truth. But anyways,
so I was just kind of in that point of
my late twenties feeling like maybe I should just move
to LA, Like, why shouldn't I It was really about
(17:43):
to start like transitioning my life there when I already
knew my husband, but he wasn't my husband. Then it
wasn't my boyfriend, he was just my friend. So we
actually started dating shortly after I got back from one
of my last trips to LA, when I was like, yeah,
I think I'm just gonna move there, and then I
was like, oh my gosh, we're love. Never mind, So
I stayed in Atlanta, and I meet people all the
(18:07):
time and they say, why do you stay in Atlanta?
Especially as a performing artist person. They're like, why would
you not go to LA to New York? Because those
two places are really like the epicenter of entertainment, you know,
as an industry. Why would you not do that? And Well,
(18:32):
for a couple of reasons. I think I think number
one at all of these junctures, because I've had, you know,
many junctures with New York, and at least one time
that I really was considering moving to LA. Every time
I would consider it, I just thought the timing just
didn't seem right for me, and the life that I
(18:53):
would have had to have been ready to live in
la or New York. I wasn't ready to do. You know.
I knew if I moved to New York, because I
had quite a few friends that had done this, Like
I knew, especially if I was moving there wanting to
pursue my career as an artist, that it was just
going to be a lot of hustle for me. You know,
(19:15):
it's going to be potentially a lot of roommates and
you know, navigating some of those things. And then my
family moved here. My mom, my sister, and my grandma,
they moved here. I was actually considering moving to New
York right before they moved here, and my grandma literally
told me she prayed that I wasn't going. And I
guess her prayers worked because I didn't go. But I
think in part what ended up happening for me career
(19:37):
wise thus far is almost every major opportunity that I've
had in my career all arrived to me in some
way connected to Atlanta. I had a mentor actually point
that out to me several years ago. She was like,
did you realize that about yourself? She was like, every
major opportunity you've had is either because you lived here
(19:59):
or because someone who currently lived in Atlanta or used
to live in Atlanta happened to say your name in
some meeting in some room or whatever. And then of course,
as Atlanta has grown as a city to be a
place where there is more entertainment industry that's happening here,
then there were a lot of things that I was
going to go to New York or go to La
(20:21):
four that in some way those people were actually coming
to Atlanta now, you know. So that's part of why
I stayed. I think also, I just love the air here.
And I don't know if that makes any sense or
if you all have a city that you currently live
or that you've lived in in the past where when
(20:44):
you land in the airport, it's like the air just
feels like, yes, this is home to me. Like that
is how Atlanta feels. And truthfully, as a kid, I
moved around a lot. Both Matt and I did. We
moved around a lot as children, and so for both
of us to now be living in the city where
(21:05):
we have both lived the longest, you know, it's sort
of like I had the reverse right, Like I grew
up with kids whose parents, like one of my best friends,
her parents still live in the same house that I
would go to to visit her in high school, right,
her parents probably had the same phone number. I didn't
have that experience growing up at all. You know, like
(21:27):
we moved around a lot, you know, because I had
two parents in the military at two different times and
all those things, you know. So I think for me,
it's been wild that I spent all of my childhood
traveling a lot, and then once I turned eighteen, you know,
I left home to move to Atlanta, and I have
never left since I've lived here. But that's been for
(21:49):
a lot of reasons. I think Atlanta, I will say,
at the time that I was getting my career started,
was a place that you could start your business and
go through the part of it where you're you know,
struggling to build it and get it off the ground,
but you could still like affordably live in Atlanta. Back then,
(22:10):
that was a big part of why I stayed. That
isn't so much the case now, y'all, but it was
true back then. You know, this was a place where
you could like be an artist and maybe you only
had to eat ram and a couple of times a week.
You don't have to eat it every day. You know,
you could live alone, or live with one roommate in
a really nice place, you know, or rent a house
with a roommate and live in a really nice place
(22:32):
while you were figuring out your artist career. And that's
one of the things that kept me here. I think
the other thing I loved about the artist community here
for me, it's just I think there's a lot of
rudeness for me in Atlanta. I think I am a
person born and bred in the South and from Southern people,
So I think there's a lot about the Southern sensibilities
(22:55):
of Atlanta, the Southern storytelling of Atlanta that is very
very akin to me, you know, and akin to my
family and our roots and things like that. So I
think being an artist here and really having the opportunity
to be around and learn from a lot of other
Southern poets and a lot of other people that were
(23:15):
going through their developmental parts of life in the South
was very, very not only influential from me, but I
think was very I guess I should say, was very
informative in this sense that it informed a lot of
what my voice was going to be and who I
was going to become. As a writer, and there's a
lot of sentimentality about the city. You know, these are
(23:39):
the open mic spaces where I really honed my voice
as a performer and learned how to write. I feel
like learned how to write and learned my voice over
and over again, you know, Like I can think of
countless moments and seasons of life as a writer where
I had gotten my voice to a certain point and
then went back out into Atlanta's poet what you've seen,
(24:00):
and like found a new voice or rediscover these other
parts of my voice. Like I'm actually in a season
like that right now, you know, just now, like now
that we're not in like the lockdown portion of the pandemic,
and I'm able to like go back out to things
and like be where people are. It's been really cool
to like take a poem back out to the same
open mic that I've been taking poems out to all
(24:23):
these years. Right So, I think a part of it
is it became a very grounding place for me when
I was performing a lot in white Christian conservative spaces.
The Atlantic poetry scene is a part of what kept
my two feet grounded. Number One connected to the art
of spoken word and in particular how black poets approached
(24:45):
that and when you're performing at that time, For me,
I was performing in these white Christian spaces. But even
now in life, even though I'm no longer performing in
Christian spaces, corporate spaces can be similar to the that
you can be in a space where people like the
idea of spoken word, but they don't really know exactly
how it's supposed to sound, and they don't have enough
(25:07):
experience listening to it to know if it's good. And
the room that I knew knew if it was good
was an open mic in Atlanta. There are poems that
I have done in front of white audiences that those
white audiences were really impressed by. But I learned that
(25:28):
the poems weren't actually that dope when I took them
into a black poetry space, which again is good for
you as a poet, because especially in the world I
was in then, it was just like performing poetry in
white Christian spaces. It's just a wild time because you
are in front of some very large audiences with amazing lighting,
(25:53):
amazing cameras, like all these things, and you can get
used to it, and if you don't watch yourself, you
will sort of, I believe your own press in a
way and coming home and being able to take those
poems out and try them in some of those spaces,
or sometimes I think for me getting home and realizing like,
(26:14):
oh shit, I'm I'm writing a lot of things that
work for those conferences, but I have ceased to write
about me and write about my own stories and my
own experiences, you know, my own family, my ancestors, my
breakup experiences, my falling in love experiences. So I think
(26:35):
in that way, the Atlanta poetry scene has always been
such a grounding and inspiring place for me as a
writer and as a performer. What are a few of
my favorite things about living here. I love that really
good fried chicken is available every day of the week.
And I realize maybe there are some other cities that's
(26:55):
true of but not all of them, not all of them,
not all major cities can say that I could any
day of the week be like I really want some
fried chicken and get like excellent fried chicken, Like I
don't have to wait for a really such and such
restaurant to be open any day of the week. I
wanted great fried chicken. There's a place to go and
do that. I love that about Atlanta. I love the
(27:19):
weather here. I realized that after I finally accepted that
I probably will never be a girl who lives in
New York full time. Part of that is just the winter.
I've lived in Texas and the South most of my life,
and I like about Atlanta that it does have seasons.
But most of the weather here is pretty temperate, you know,
(27:39):
but you can tell, like right now, we're just at
the point where, like now it's getting to be spring,
which in some other places would start to feel like
summer because it gets pretty warm here pretty quickly. But yeah,
you get all four seasons here, but you're not getting
a lot of snow. And if you get snow or ice,
this whole place is shutting down and everything out of
the grocery stores will be gone within forty eight hours.
(28:00):
Get out of here. So I think that's one thing
that I love about Atlanta. I really love the artistic
community here. The artistic community here has been really good
to me and good for me. I feel like we
are very giving towards each other. It's like I've had
(28:21):
people refer me for gigs. I've referred to other people
for gigs. I've had people who ended up in a
situation where they had budgets or whatever where they could
book artists and they booked me, and I totally do
the same thing. So I would say the artistic scene
for me and my experience has been a very communal place.
It's a place where people are looking out for you,
do want the best for you everything. And the artistic
(28:43):
scene here is not about competition. And I like that
because I know that isn't true of all cities artistic scenes.
I loved especially a particular era of it for me.
This may still be true, but there was a particular
era of time for me here where the artistic scenes connected.
(29:05):
So I was on the poetry scene. But then I
also had some friends who were musicians and singers, and
so we would go and support them in their shows.
We would sometimes like collaborate on pieces and shows and
events and things. And so I loved sort of all
of the Venn diagram of the different artistic communities. You know,
(29:26):
you might have some black artists that are in the
visual arts side of it, and then they might also
have some friends who are poets who also have friends
who are musicians, you know, and before you know it.
There's there's just this kind of cross collaborative conversation that
I've always loved about the scene here. I'm not gonna
lie like my family's here now. That's definitely a part
(29:48):
of what made Atlanta home to me. You know, my mom,
my grandma, and my sister moved here when I was
about twenty four to twenty five, so a couple of
years after I graduated from college, they moved here, and
my sister actually complete need her whole high school and
college years in Atlanta. So that made a difference too,
because I don't know, I'm not sure if it would
(30:09):
have felt like home as much if my mom and
my sister and my grandma had still been in Texas
and I was always going home that, you know, in
a certain way for me, it's like wherever my mom is,
that's home. And once my mom moved here to Atlanta,
it was like Atlanta already felt like home to me,
but now that my mom was here, that really felt like, Okay,
now this is home because I don't have to travel
(30:30):
to go home to her, you know. Now we've all
made our home here. And then once I got married,
my husband's family all of his immediate family are in
the state of Georgia. Everybody's within driving distance from each other,
so you know, that also makes a difference too. And
I never would have thought that I would have defined
home based on living close to my family, especially not
(30:52):
when you're you know, in your teenage years. And there
were certain parts in my twenties where I just felt
very like, I need to be I need to define
and be very different from what the family's doing. So
these are the things I do with my friends, and
these are things I do with my family, you know,
Like I felt very like critical about having those types
of delineations, but now I'm like, oh my gosh, I
(31:13):
love that I live close to my family. You know,
my mom lived in Texas, we really had like maybe
two holidays a year where we saw each other, whereas
now it's like I get to see my mom on
Mother's Day, on her birthday, on my grandma's birthday. You know.
So I think that also is a thing that doesn't
have anything to do with the city of Atlanta, but
is one of my favorite things about living here. I
(31:35):
love the music scene here. You know, I don't make
music myself, but I come from a long line of musicians.
So I really love music. Music informs a lot of
my creative work. So I love just even the indie
music scene here. This is not the artists too are
traveling nationally and bring their tours to Atlanta. Like just
(31:56):
the independent artist that you could go into local venues
here and hear them play music. I loved our music scene.
I love the music heritage that's been here, in particular
the black music heritage that's been here in Atlanta. So
I love that. I love that I can get a
chance to hear some different artists and hear people that
(32:18):
I love and know. And I could go someplace and
hear an artist I've never heard before in my life
and be like, Wow, that person's amazing. They live right
here in Atlanta. That's wild. I love that. Last question
is what I hope for Atlanta's future, and Atlanta as
a city is in a really interesting time. I think
there are quite a few major cities in America that
(32:40):
are going through this kind of change. You know, Atlanta
has been a very black city for a very long time.
I would say there's still a lot of black folks here.
For a lot of black people, this is one of
the first cities in America they've been to where they
see black people experiencing financial world, where they see black
people being upwardly mobile. And I remember when we were
(33:05):
driving here, my mom and I driving here for me
to move on to Spellman's campus, and just like even
being on the highway and looking over and seeing like
black people driving binses and beamers and stuff like that.
You know, it was just so rare to see that
where I was from in San Antonio, and a lot
of people have said that to me when they move here.
It's just rare to see black people living in these
(33:27):
big old houses and stuff down here. Like all of
that made a lot of black folks feel hopeful for
their future and for what success could be. I think
now that I've lived here a long time, you know,
Atlanta has tensions like any city does. You know, Atlanta
is going through a very large period of gentrification right now,
(33:52):
and that is affecting the people in our community that
our most vulnerable, that are most economically vulnerable, and that
also affects the culture of the place. There are a
lot of places that were centered for Atlanta culture when
(34:12):
I moved here that were priced out of the area.
So those spots where all of the poets would gather
aren't there anymore because there are condos there now, or
because there's a CBD store there now, or whatever it is.
You know. So I do experience those feelings, having lived
here over twenty years and being like, damn, you know,
(34:34):
there are a lot of places that really make Atlanta Atlanta.
And I think that the difficulty with gentrification is that
sometimes in how the cities get planned and how the
real estate gets built, it starts to make all the cities,
all the major cities, look the same, versus you being
(34:54):
able to get somewhere and be like, oh, this is Atlanta.
Like you could look at the houses there, you could
look at the architecture, you could look at so many
things and go, this is Atlanta. And there are parts
of Atlanta that are just starting to feel bland. Could
be any city. And I hate that for us. And
I think there are a lot of people and I
(35:16):
hope to be a part of this too, just doing
everything we can to preserve the preserve what some of
us will call the old Atlanta narrative. And in Atlanta
there is this interesting dynamic between the people who are
considered old Atlanta, which is people who've been born and
raised here, people who have lived here for generations, very
(35:39):
specifically Black folks that have lived here for generations. And
then there are the New Atlanta folks who moved here
a few years ago or moved here ten years ago.
I would probably be considered new Atlanta in some ways too,
because I didn't grow up here. I didn't go to
high school here, and wasn't born and raised here. My
people aren't from here. But what tends to happen is
(36:01):
people moved to a new place. They moved to a
new city, and sometimes the newish people that move there
begin to define what those neighborhood, what those neighborhoods can
be called, or what that side of town should be
referred to as. Now and all of this rebrand and everything,
and in a sense, the narratives of the people who
were already here doing amazing work, the people who were
(36:24):
already here making so many creative things happen, their narratives
get lost. So this is one of the reasons why
I was interested to become the chapter host of Creative
Mornings Atlanta, because it would give me the opportunity to
share narrative you know, share more narrative with folks and
(36:44):
give more of an opportunity there where you don't have
to act like Atlanta just hopped up and invented itself.
You know, five years ago or ten years ago, that
Atlanta has been here, that the black folks who were
here and helped build the city were here even you know,
also needing to acknowledge, which is very interesting when you
(37:05):
get into the history of how the city of Atlanta
was built. You know that this land was originally the
land of the Miscogee Nation, land of the Cherokee Nation,
and also gaining that history because they were forced off
of the land where their people had resided for centuries.
So it's interesting right when we consider the places that
(37:25):
we live or that we have lived, that we love,
and every place that we call home, whether it's our
original home with our families of origin or the cities
where we grew up, all of the places we call
home have complicated histories. And I guess for me right now,
it's about you know, doing everything I can to tell
(37:46):
the story of home accurately and to honor all of
the people's who call this place home, and for me
also to give back to Atlanta's artistic creative community because
it has given so much to me. So however, I
can do that by participating in arts that are happening here,
(38:07):
by supporting our local artists by using their music, you know,
whenever I can, by if I can, If somebody's asking
me about artists, I want to suggest for something, nine
times out of ten, I'm gonna say artists from here,
because that's how we do, you know. So I love Atlanta.
I don't really see myself moving. There's a couple of
cities in America, like New York, like LA, especially now
(38:30):
with some of the work I'm doing. A lot of
the projects that I'm working on, Almost all of the
projects that I'm working on that are not my own projects, books, podcasts,
things like that are all like related to either companies
or people that are in LA right now. So I'm
not opposed to, Like, if a project came up and
I need to be in LA for six months and
(38:52):
you need to be in New York for six months,
I wouldn't be opposed to that. I would do that,
but I would still be like, um, when this is over,
I'm going back to Atlanta. I don't know, It's just
home to me now. So anyways, I will love Atlanta forever.
That's just the truth. So shout out to Atlanta and
for my old school atl people. I will end this
(39:12):
episode with a call that people who've lived in Atlanta
a long time used to say, if you were in
a crowd in an audience, somebody brought up somebody from Atlanta,
you will yell out atl home. So that's how I'm
a close to episode. I love Atlanta. If y'all haven't
been here, I hope you'll get a chance to visit
to And even if it's not Atlanta for you, whatever
(39:34):
that city is that you forever love, I hope that
you will find ways to give back to it in
the ways that it's given good things to you. See
y'all next week. Hurt with Amina Brown is produced by
(39:58):
Matt Owen for So Graffiti Productions as a part of
the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks
for listening and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review
the podcast.
Hey, everybody, welcome back to a new episode of Her
with Amina Brown. And I have been having Matt here
and some guests here, but now it's just us. It's
just me and y'all, So thank you wherever you're listening from.
And today, the day that this episode releases, is considered
(00:52):
four oh four Day in Atlanta, which is a day
that has lots of events and celebrations related to how
much so many of us loved the city and love
the culture here, and so I thought it would be
cool in celebration of four or four Day to talk
about why I love Atlanta and why it has been
home to me for so many years. So thank you
(01:12):
for joining me in the living room. Let us talk
about my home city and why it's amazing. So first
question is why did I move to Atlanta? I guess
I should also answer, and when I moved to Atlanta
to go to college. I moved here in nineteen ninety eight, y'all.
I just can't believe it was that long ago. And
(01:34):
when I was applying to college, I'm not sure if
I talked about this in detail on the podcast before,
but when I was applying to college, Spellman was my
number one choice. I had wanted to go to Spellman
since I was nine years old. My mom was a
nurse in the Army, and she introduced me to a
pediatrician that she worked with. And my mom would do
(01:56):
this type of thing periodically, just you know, if she
awesome one that she thought it would be good for
me or my sister to know. She would do whatever
she could to just expose us to different people, different professions,
different things that could potentially be helpful to us in
the future. And so she introduced me to doctor Stephanie,
(02:16):
a friend of hers also, and doctor Stephanie took me
in her office. I remember this part, but I can't
remember and my mom can't remember what it was I
talked about when I went in doctor Stephanie's office. My
mom just said, at nine years old, I walked out
and told my mom that I was going to Spellman.
So I've had dreams of going to Spellman for a
(02:38):
long time. And to be clear, I was going to
junior high in high school in the nineties. So there
were a lot of different ways to be encouraged to
go to an HBCU and to be encouraged to go
to Atlanta, to go to an HPCU. So back then
there was a magazine called Young Sisters and Brothers Magazine YSB,
(03:02):
and every year, the same way that a lot of
magazines will do, like the top colleges in the nation,
ys B would do that, but for historically black schools.
And so I remember like taking the page out of
the magazine and like putting it up on my wall.
I don't know if I'm assuming this is still a
teenager thing, that teenagers maybe still do this, but back
(03:24):
then we were still reading magazines, like physical magazines, so
we would take they had posters in them of different
artists you love, and I remember looking at that and
being like, oh, yeah, I really want to go to Spellman.
I want to give a shout out to my friend
Porsche from elementary school. I lived in Silver Spring when
I was in elementary school, and my friend Porsche and
I we were best friends and we just dreamed, dreamed,
(03:47):
dreamed that we would both end up going to Spellman someday.
Even by the time the film Boys in the Hood
came out, like when you get to the end of
the movie and the central characters that Cuba Gooding Junior
and Nia Long played, it had like the epilogue, I
guess of the story, which basically was that Cuba Gooding
Junior's character ended up at Morehouse and Neia Long's character
(04:10):
ended up at Spellman. So it was like I had
this moment with Doctor Stephanie and then all these other
moments as I got older that were definitely like encouraging me,
you know, further pushing me on to come to Spellman.
And I don't think I had considered as much like
what it meant to be coming to Atlanta. I was
(04:30):
definitely thinking about Spellman, thinking about the Atlanta University Center,
which contained at that time Spellman, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College,
Morris Brown College, plus the Interdenominational Theological Center, and Morehouse
School of Medicine. So at that time there were technically
six schools, all historically black colleges and universities, in the
(04:53):
Atlanta University Center. So I thought about just being there
for school. I had attended Howard's homecoming when my mom
and I lived in the DC area, so I really
thought about that. But I really didn't think a lot
about the city. And I'm going to say something that
I would never advise anyone to do, but I did
(05:13):
not tour Spellman before attending there. I actually did not
do a lot of college tours. Now that I think
about it, I think almost all of the schools I
applied to I had never been there. I applied to Spellman,
I applied to Sarah Lawrence College. I applied to Texas
A and M and University of Texas, and I applied
(05:35):
to Clark Atlanta. I never visited any of those schools.
I don't know why. I just don't remember. I just
don't remember us doing that. I don't remember why. But anyway,
I didn't tour schools. I don't recommend that, but I
kind of had my sites set on Spellman. They were
(05:56):
the last acceptance letter that I received, and it was
just like, no contest, Like I'm going there. I was
a part of a wonderful Black church growing up, and
I was already coming from a family that was very
college forward. You know, my grandma really believed in education
for all of her kids, grandkids, great grants, everybody. So
(06:19):
my grandma still to this day, is really big on education.
So going to college really wasn't like if you go
on to college. It was when you go to college,
you'll decide your major. When you go to college. You'll
decide if you're going to pledge when you go to college.
All of it was when you go to college. Nothing
was like I had a choice, and I'm a oldest
(06:39):
kid and a rule follower, so I just went ahead
and went that way. I think I visited Atlanta once
the year before I went to college because I was
a part of the NAACP's act So competition, which I
have talked about on a previous episode here. Because the
NAACP act So competition played a big role into me
(07:02):
really getting into performing my own poetry when I was
a high school student. So I made it to win
our local act Soel competitionist in Antonio, where I was
going to high school, and the national act Soel was
in Atlanta the year before I went to college, so
I got a chance to come to Atlanta. But it's
(07:23):
wild like something happened. I think we actually made it
down to the Atlanta University Center, but something happened where
we weren't able to actually tour any of the colleges
that day. So I actually saw Georgia Tech's campus much
more than I saw Spellman's campus, and there was nothing
(07:46):
that I was going to major end that would have
made me in any way attend Georgia Tech. So that's wild, right,
I saw their campus much more than anything. So anyhow,
I got into Spellman and moved in in August to
nineteen ninety eight. This is a wonderful year for music.
A Quim and I had just come out. The Miseducation
(08:09):
of Lauren Hill had just come out. So my first
semester in Atlanta was full of outcast music, which was
really wonderful. I've been exposed a little bit to outcast
in Texas because I don't personally consider Texas a part
of the South, but I do see how Texas has
(08:32):
sort of like a lot of different layers of culture there,
and I do think Southern culture is present there in
some places. And for those of us who were lovers
of hip hop, we were listening to the other hip
hop that was coming out of the South that seemed
a bit closer to where we lived in Texas culturally
than maybe a lot of the East Coast hip hop did.
(08:52):
So we obviously listened a lot to Master P and
what was coming out of No Limit Records and A
Balling Him, JG. And you know, all of those things,
So all of that was sort of like leading to
also having a little bit of exposure to the music
that was coming out of Atlanta at the time, plus
the boodhy music that was coming out of Florida from
Uncle Luke at the time. So you know, this is
(09:14):
sort of like the cultural era. When I moved to Atlanta,
this was two years post the Olympics, which was a
big time in Atlanta's cultural history because that was for
other people who didn't live here. That was the first
time that people really looked at Atlanta as a world city.
And historically, you're you know, watching Atlanta go through a
(09:35):
lot of changes in the city to get ready for
the Olympics, and you watch the city go through a
whole lot of changes after the Olympics had been here.
Ninety eight was also I believe that was the last
year of Freaknick as we knew it. So I was
sort of moving to the city when the city was
in this interesting flux culturally, but that flux didn't really
(10:04):
touch my experiences in the same way as it would
have people that had been living here a long time.
So I spent my first four years in what was
Southwest Atlanta and back then, if you were from Southwest
Atlanta or grew up there, they would have this phrase.
They would say southwest I think it was Southwest atl
(10:28):
too strong, were the too strong? Or they would call
Southwest swats as sort of this like phrasing around Southwest Atlanta.
So I grew up there, I grew up. Grew up
I mean in a way. Yes, that's probably why it
came out. I didn't mean to say I grew up,
but in a way. Yeah, it's like I was an adult.
(10:48):
But that time between eighteen and twenty two is a
lot of growing up, is a lot of developmental things.
And having that experience in the West End, being at
historically black college that has its own you know, either
ways it is perceived to be elite or has ways
(11:10):
it can participate, you know, in elitism in certain ways,
and being faced with sort of here we were on
this college campus. I mean, I'm in my first two
years of school. I'm reading France Faynone and Beverly Guy
Chef Tall and Edwige, Don Decott and Pearl Clague and
(11:30):
Nikki Giovanni and Tony kay Bambar, Like I'm I am
reading deep, deep into not just the canon of Black
history and black literature, but also reading black women in
so many very specific ways. So you're in this sort
of very like educationally entrenched environment, and then you step
(11:54):
a block or two away from campus and you were
in the hood. Even when you drive to Spellman now
like the way it was when I moved here, it
was very different. Spellman had different like areas around it
that were still the projects, right, So you were readily
able to in the same way that I could be
(12:16):
on campus and be there with all of these other
black women who are on this same you know, collegiate
educational journey that I was on and step two blocks
outside of campus and also see my people who were
just you know, trying to survive and doing whatever they
had to do to make it and to get by.
And so I think that was dissonant in certain regards,
(12:41):
and it was also very connected, you know, in other regards.
So I feel like the first four years it's like,
I don't know, there were times I got to see Atlanta,
Like I probably will have to do a separate episode
since we are beginning National Poetry Month. I'd love to
do a separate episode and talk to y'all about my
(13:02):
first open mic experiences in the city. But my time
in college I did have sometimes that I sort of
broke away from what I was doing for the most part,
which was outside of my schooling. I was involved in
campus ministry and I've talked about that some in other
episodes here. So because I was involved in campus ministry
and very involved in church, that really didn't leave a
(13:25):
whole lot of other time for social activities. I wasn't
dating anyone. But the one thing I was sort of
like escaping away from all of the ministry stuff we
were doing, is I was going to open mics in
the city. I went to open mics on campus, but
most of the open mics I went to when I
was in college were just grown people open mics. They
(13:45):
were not for college students. And I think in a way,
me having had that sort of deep dive into what
spoken word could sound like and to get to experience
that in very black bass was such a gift to me.
I thought it was a gift then and all these
(14:05):
years later, I still feel that way about it. So
I got to experience like a little bit of the
city that way. But you know, for the most part,
I was a student and I wouldn't dating anybody, and
I really didn't experience a whole whole lot of things
outside of like if they weren't poetry related or ministry
related pretty much. So that was what made me move
here to Atlanta. When I graduated from college, which I've
(14:28):
talked about this part in previous episodes, I applied to
grad school. I applied to Georgia State, I applied to
University of Pittsburgh, and I applied to NYU to get
an MFA and poetry. I was denied to all three schools.
So this was one moment that I was in consideration of, like, Okay,
I've been in Atlanta for four years now, I'm about
(14:49):
to leave. And then I didn't get in, so I
had to stay. And then around the time I was
like twenty five or so, I found out about this
ministry program was like a Christian based program where I
don't know better words to you, so I'm going to
(15:09):
use this as a word, but I think in a
way it was sort of like you could kind of
be involved in ministry or missions kind of projects, if
that language makes sense, y'all, But like you could basically
have a year in New York, but you would have
to raise fundage for yourself. It's fundage a word, y'all
(15:31):
that I really you would have to raise funds for
yourself to cover, you know, the cost of you living
in New York for a year. I think the program
had a way that it could somewhat subsidize your housing
or help you find housing that would be you know,
still safe but less expensive, but still you know, it's
in New York. And I had this like fork in
(15:53):
the road right there. Truthfully, I had a fork in
the road when I was in high school because Sarah
Lawrence was, you know, really kind of courting me to
go early decision with them, and those of you that
aren't familiar with that, I'm thinking this still exists, but
it was twenty years ago. So early decision basically meant
(16:15):
you were telling a college like, if you accept me,
I am agreeing that this is the school I'm going
to attend. And I could not do it. I couldn't
go early decision without knowing if I was going to
get into Spellment or not, because I knew if I
said yes to Sarah Lawrence that I would be really
upset to find out I got into Spellment. So I
didn't go early decision Sarah Lawrence and then got waitlisted
(16:36):
when I did get accepted. So that was my first
like fork in the road, isn't New York, isn't Atlanta?
I chose Atlanta. Well, here I am twenty five with
this opportunity to possibly go to New York for a
year or I had this corporate job on the table,
and I decided to stay in Atlanta and still work
the corporate job. I had another time, maybe, like I
(16:59):
don't know, a few years after that, where I was
considering moving to la and I had made a lot
of like connections that just had a lot of relationships
out there, and I just I think I kind of
felt over Atlanta because you know, I just felt like
I'd been here so long, and you know, I was like,
I don't have a family, I'm not dating anybody that
(17:21):
I feel like I need to consider them. You know.
I think the truth was I just wasn't dating anyone.
It wasn't that I wasn't dating someone I had to consider.
I just wasn't dating anyone. That's the truth. But anyways,
so I was just kind of in that point of
my late twenties feeling like maybe I should just move
to LA, Like, why shouldn't I It was really about
(17:43):
to start like transitioning my life there when I already
knew my husband, but he wasn't my husband. Then it
wasn't my boyfriend, he was just my friend. So we
actually started dating shortly after I got back from one
of my last trips to LA, when I was like, yeah,
I think I'm just gonna move there, and then I
was like, oh my gosh, we're love. Never mind, So
I stayed in Atlanta, and I meet people all the
(18:07):
time and they say, why do you stay in Atlanta?
Especially as a performing artist person. They're like, why would
you not go to LA to New York? Because those
two places are really like the epicenter of entertainment, you know,
as an industry. Why would you not do that? And Well,
(18:32):
for a couple of reasons. I think I think number
one at all of these junctures, because I've had, you know,
many junctures with New York, and at least one time
that I really was considering moving to LA. Every time
I would consider it, I just thought the timing just
didn't seem right for me, and the life that I
(18:53):
would have had to have been ready to live in
la or New York. I wasn't ready to do. You know.
I knew if I moved to New York, because I
had quite a few friends that had done this, Like
I knew, especially if I was moving there wanting to
pursue my career as an artist, that it was just
going to be a lot of hustle for me. You know,
(19:15):
it's going to be potentially a lot of roommates and
you know, navigating some of those things. And then my
family moved here. My mom, my sister, and my grandma,
they moved here. I was actually considering moving to New
York right before they moved here, and my grandma literally
told me she prayed that I wasn't going. And I
guess her prayers worked because I didn't go. But I
think in part what ended up happening for me career
(19:37):
wise thus far is almost every major opportunity that I've
had in my career all arrived to me in some
way connected to Atlanta. I had a mentor actually point
that out to me several years ago. She was like,
did you realize that about yourself? She was like, every
major opportunity you've had is either because you lived here
(19:59):
or because someone who currently lived in Atlanta or used
to live in Atlanta happened to say your name in
some meeting in some room or whatever. And then of course,
as Atlanta has grown as a city to be a
place where there is more entertainment industry that's happening here,
then there were a lot of things that I was
going to go to New York or go to La
(20:21):
four that in some way those people were actually coming
to Atlanta now, you know. So that's part of why
I stayed. I think also, I just love the air here.
And I don't know if that makes any sense or
if you all have a city that you currently live
or that you've lived in in the past where when
(20:44):
you land in the airport, it's like the air just
feels like, yes, this is home to me. Like that
is how Atlanta feels. And truthfully, as a kid, I
moved around a lot. Both Matt and I did. We
moved around a lot as children, and so for both
of us to now be living in the city where
(21:05):
we have both lived the longest, you know, it's sort
of like I had the reverse right, Like I grew
up with kids whose parents, like one of my best friends,
her parents still live in the same house that I
would go to to visit her in high school, right,
her parents probably had the same phone number. I didn't
have that experience growing up at all. You know, like
(21:27):
we moved around a lot, you know, because I had
two parents in the military at two different times and
all those things, you know. So I think for me,
it's been wild that I spent all of my childhood
traveling a lot, and then once I turned eighteen, you know,
I left home to move to Atlanta, and I have
never left since I've lived here. But that's been for
(21:49):
a lot of reasons. I think Atlanta, I will say,
at the time that I was getting my career started,
was a place that you could start your business and
go through the part of it where you're you know,
struggling to build it and get it off the ground,
but you could still like affordably live in Atlanta. Back then,
(22:10):
that was a big part of why I stayed. That
isn't so much the case now, y'all, but it was
true back then. You know, this was a place where
you could like be an artist and maybe you only
had to eat ram and a couple of times a week.
You don't have to eat it every day. You know,
you could live alone, or live with one roommate in
a really nice place, you know, or rent a house
with a roommate and live in a really nice place
(22:32):
while you were figuring out your artist career. And that's
one of the things that kept me here. I think
the other thing I loved about the artist community here
for me, it's just I think there's a lot of
rudeness for me in Atlanta. I think I am a
person born and bred in the South and from Southern people,
So I think there's a lot about the Southern sensibilities
(22:55):
of Atlanta, the Southern storytelling of Atlanta that is very
very akin to me, you know, and akin to my
family and our roots and things like that. So I
think being an artist here and really having the opportunity
to be around and learn from a lot of other
Southern poets and a lot of other people that were
(23:15):
going through their developmental parts of life in the South
was very, very not only influential from me, but I
think was very I guess I should say, was very
informative in this sense that it informed a lot of
what my voice was going to be and who I
was going to become. As a writer, and there's a
lot of sentimentality about the city. You know, these are
(23:39):
the open mic spaces where I really honed my voice
as a performer and learned how to write. I feel
like learned how to write and learned my voice over
and over again, you know, Like I can think of
countless moments and seasons of life as a writer where
I had gotten my voice to a certain point and
then went back out into Atlanta's poet what you've seen,
(24:00):
and like found a new voice or rediscover these other
parts of my voice. Like I'm actually in a season
like that right now, you know, just now, like now
that we're not in like the lockdown portion of the pandemic,
and I'm able to like go back out to things
and like be where people are. It's been really cool
to like take a poem back out to the same
open mic that I've been taking poems out to all
(24:23):
these years. Right So, I think a part of it
is it became a very grounding place for me when
I was performing a lot in white Christian conservative spaces.
The Atlantic poetry scene is a part of what kept
my two feet grounded. Number One connected to the art
of spoken word and in particular how black poets approached
(24:45):
that and when you're performing at that time, For me,
I was performing in these white Christian spaces. But even
now in life, even though I'm no longer performing in
Christian spaces, corporate spaces can be similar to the that
you can be in a space where people like the
idea of spoken word, but they don't really know exactly
how it's supposed to sound, and they don't have enough
(25:07):
experience listening to it to know if it's good. And
the room that I knew knew if it was good
was an open mic in Atlanta. There are poems that
I have done in front of white audiences that those
white audiences were really impressed by. But I learned that
(25:28):
the poems weren't actually that dope when I took them
into a black poetry space, which again is good for
you as a poet, because especially in the world I
was in then, it was just like performing poetry in
white Christian spaces. It's just a wild time because you
are in front of some very large audiences with amazing lighting,
(25:53):
amazing cameras, like all these things, and you can get
used to it, and if you don't watch yourself, you
will sort of, I believe your own press in a
way and coming home and being able to take those
poems out and try them in some of those spaces,
or sometimes I think for me getting home and realizing like,
(26:14):
oh shit, I'm I'm writing a lot of things that
work for those conferences, but I have ceased to write
about me and write about my own stories and my
own experiences, you know, my own family, my ancestors, my
breakup experiences, my falling in love experiences. So I think
(26:35):
in that way, the Atlanta poetry scene has always been
such a grounding and inspiring place for me as a
writer and as a performer. What are a few of
my favorite things about living here. I love that really
good fried chicken is available every day of the week.
And I realize maybe there are some other cities that's
(26:55):
true of but not all of them, not all of them,
not all major cities can say that I could any
day of the week be like I really want some
fried chicken and get like excellent fried chicken, Like I
don't have to wait for a really such and such
restaurant to be open any day of the week. I
wanted great fried chicken. There's a place to go and
do that. I love that about Atlanta. I love the
(27:19):
weather here. I realized that after I finally accepted that
I probably will never be a girl who lives in
New York full time. Part of that is just the winter.
I've lived in Texas and the South most of my life,
and I like about Atlanta that it does have seasons.
But most of the weather here is pretty temperate, you know,
(27:39):
but you can tell, like right now, we're just at
the point where, like now it's getting to be spring,
which in some other places would start to feel like
summer because it gets pretty warm here pretty quickly. But yeah,
you get all four seasons here, but you're not getting
a lot of snow. And if you get snow or ice,
this whole place is shutting down and everything out of
the grocery stores will be gone within forty eight hours.
(28:00):
Get out of here. So I think that's one thing
that I love about Atlanta. I really love the artistic
community here. The artistic community here has been really good
to me and good for me. I feel like we
are very giving towards each other. It's like I've had
(28:21):
people refer me for gigs. I've referred to other people
for gigs. I've had people who ended up in a
situation where they had budgets or whatever where they could
book artists and they booked me, and I totally do
the same thing. So I would say the artistic scene
for me and my experience has been a very communal place.
It's a place where people are looking out for you,
do want the best for you everything. And the artistic
(28:43):
scene here is not about competition. And I like that
because I know that isn't true of all cities artistic scenes.
I loved especially a particular era of it for me.
This may still be true, but there was a particular
era of time for me here where the artistic scenes connected.
(29:05):
So I was on the poetry scene. But then I
also had some friends who were musicians and singers, and
so we would go and support them in their shows.
We would sometimes like collaborate on pieces and shows and
events and things. And so I loved sort of all
of the Venn diagram of the different artistic communities. You know,
(29:26):
you might have some black artists that are in the
visual arts side of it, and then they might also
have some friends who are poets who also have friends
who are musicians, you know, and before you know it.
There's there's just this kind of cross collaborative conversation that
I've always loved about the scene here. I'm not gonna
lie like my family's here now. That's definitely a part
(29:48):
of what made Atlanta home to me. You know, my mom,
my grandma, and my sister moved here when I was
about twenty four to twenty five, so a couple of
years after I graduated from college, they moved here, and
my sister actually complete need her whole high school and
college years in Atlanta. So that made a difference too,
because I don't know, I'm not sure if it would
(30:09):
have felt like home as much if my mom and
my sister and my grandma had still been in Texas
and I was always going home that, you know, in
a certain way for me, it's like wherever my mom is,
that's home. And once my mom moved here to Atlanta,
it was like Atlanta already felt like home to me,
but now that my mom was here, that really felt like, Okay,
now this is home because I don't have to travel
(30:30):
to go home to her, you know. Now we've all
made our home here. And then once I got married,
my husband's family all of his immediate family are in
the state of Georgia. Everybody's within driving distance from each other,
so you know, that also makes a difference too. And
I never would have thought that I would have defined
home based on living close to my family, especially not
(30:52):
when you're you know, in your teenage years. And there
were certain parts in my twenties where I just felt
very like, I need to be I need to define
and be very different from what the family's doing. So
these are the things I do with my friends, and
these are things I do with my family, you know,
Like I felt very like critical about having those types
of delineations, but now I'm like, oh my gosh, I
(31:13):
love that I live close to my family. You know,
my mom lived in Texas, we really had like maybe
two holidays a year where we saw each other, whereas
now it's like I get to see my mom on
Mother's Day, on her birthday, on my grandma's birthday. You know.
So I think that also is a thing that doesn't
have anything to do with the city of Atlanta, but
is one of my favorite things about living here. I
(31:35):
love the music scene here. You know, I don't make
music myself, but I come from a long line of musicians.
So I really love music. Music informs a lot of
my creative work. So I love just even the indie
music scene here. This is not the artists too are
traveling nationally and bring their tours to Atlanta. Like just
(31:56):
the independent artist that you could go into local venues
here and hear them play music. I loved our music scene.
I love the music heritage that's been here, in particular
the black music heritage that's been here in Atlanta. So
I love that. I love that I can get a
chance to hear some different artists and hear people that
(32:18):
I love and know. And I could go someplace and
hear an artist I've never heard before in my life
and be like, Wow, that person's amazing. They live right
here in Atlanta. That's wild. I love that. Last question
is what I hope for Atlanta's future, and Atlanta as
a city is in a really interesting time. I think
there are quite a few major cities in America that
(32:40):
are going through this kind of change. You know, Atlanta
has been a very black city for a very long time.
I would say there's still a lot of black folks here.
For a lot of black people, this is one of
the first cities in America they've been to where they
see black people experiencing financial world, where they see black
people being upwardly mobile. And I remember when we were
(33:05):
driving here, my mom and I driving here for me
to move on to Spellman's campus, and just like even
being on the highway and looking over and seeing like
black people driving binses and beamers and stuff like that.
You know, it was just so rare to see that
where I was from in San Antonio, and a lot
of people have said that to me when they move here.
It's just rare to see black people living in these
(33:27):
big old houses and stuff down here. Like all of
that made a lot of black folks feel hopeful for
their future and for what success could be. I think
now that I've lived here a long time, you know,
Atlanta has tensions like any city does. You know, Atlanta
is going through a very large period of gentrification right now,
(33:52):
and that is affecting the people in our community that
our most vulnerable, that are most economically vulnerable, and that
also affects the culture of the place. There are a
lot of places that were centered for Atlanta culture when
(34:12):
I moved here that were priced out of the area.
So those spots where all of the poets would gather
aren't there anymore because there are condos there now, or
because there's a CBD store there now, or whatever it is.
You know. So I do experience those feelings, having lived
here over twenty years and being like, damn, you know,
(34:34):
there are a lot of places that really make Atlanta Atlanta.
And I think that the difficulty with gentrification is that
sometimes in how the cities get planned and how the
real estate gets built, it starts to make all the cities,
all the major cities, look the same, versus you being
(34:54):
able to get somewhere and be like, oh, this is Atlanta.
Like you could look at the houses there, you could
look at the architecture, you could look at so many
things and go, this is Atlanta. And there are parts
of Atlanta that are just starting to feel bland. Could
be any city. And I hate that for us. And
I think there are a lot of people and I
(35:16):
hope to be a part of this too, just doing
everything we can to preserve the preserve what some of
us will call the old Atlanta narrative. And in Atlanta
there is this interesting dynamic between the people who are
considered old Atlanta, which is people who've been born and
raised here, people who have lived here for generations, very
(35:39):
specifically Black folks that have lived here for generations. And
then there are the New Atlanta folks who moved here
a few years ago or moved here ten years ago.
I would probably be considered new Atlanta in some ways too,
because I didn't grow up here. I didn't go to
high school here, and wasn't born and raised here. My
people aren't from here. But what tends to happen is
(36:01):
people moved to a new place. They moved to a
new city, and sometimes the newish people that move there
begin to define what those neighborhood, what those neighborhoods can
be called, or what that side of town should be
referred to as. Now and all of this rebrand and everything,
and in a sense, the narratives of the people who
were already here doing amazing work, the people who were
(36:24):
already here making so many creative things happen, their narratives
get lost. So this is one of the reasons why
I was interested to become the chapter host of Creative
Mornings Atlanta, because it would give me the opportunity to
share narrative you know, share more narrative with folks and
(36:44):
give more of an opportunity there where you don't have
to act like Atlanta just hopped up and invented itself.
You know, five years ago or ten years ago, that
Atlanta has been here, that the black folks who were
here and helped build the city were here even you know,
also needing to acknowledge, which is very interesting when you
(37:05):
get into the history of how the city of Atlanta
was built. You know that this land was originally the
land of the Miscogee Nation, land of the Cherokee Nation,
and also gaining that history because they were forced off
of the land where their people had resided for centuries.
So it's interesting right when we consider the places that
(37:25):
we live or that we have lived, that we love,
and every place that we call home, whether it's our
original home with our families of origin or the cities
where we grew up, all of the places we call
home have complicated histories. And I guess for me right now,
it's about you know, doing everything I can to tell
(37:46):
the story of home accurately and to honor all of
the people's who call this place home, and for me
also to give back to Atlanta's artistic creative community because
it has given so much to me. So however, I
can do that by participating in arts that are happening here,
(38:07):
by supporting our local artists by using their music, you know,
whenever I can, by if I can, If somebody's asking
me about artists, I want to suggest for something, nine
times out of ten, I'm gonna say artists from here,
because that's how we do, you know. So I love Atlanta.
I don't really see myself moving. There's a couple of
cities in America, like New York, like LA, especially now
(38:30):
with some of the work I'm doing. A lot of
the projects that I'm working on, Almost all of the
projects that I'm working on that are not my own projects, books, podcasts,
things like that are all like related to either companies
or people that are in LA right now. So I'm
not opposed to, Like, if a project came up and
I need to be in LA for six months and
(38:52):
you need to be in New York for six months,
I wouldn't be opposed to that. I would do that,
but I would still be like, um, when this is over,
I'm going back to Atlanta. I don't know, It's just
home to me now. So anyways, I will love Atlanta forever.
That's just the truth. So shout out to Atlanta and
for my old school atl people. I will end this
(39:12):
episode with a call that people who've lived in Atlanta
a long time used to say, if you were in
a crowd in an audience, somebody brought up somebody from Atlanta,
you will yell out atl home. So that's how I'm
a close to episode. I love Atlanta. If y'all haven't
been here, I hope you'll get a chance to visit
to And even if it's not Atlanta for you, whatever
(39:34):
that city is that you forever love, I hope that
you will find ways to give back to it in
the ways that it's given good things to you. See
y'all next week. Hurt with Amina Brown is produced by
(39:58):
Matt Owen for So Graffiti Productions as a part of
the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks
for listening and don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review
the podcast.
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