Faces of Milwaukee: Dasha Kelly Hamilton

I admit feeling guilty about my unfamiliarity with the work of Dasha Kelly Hamilton, the subject of today's portrait, given her distinguished career. Milwaukee's current poet laureate and the only Black Woman to be so named, Hamilton is not only an accomplished poet who has produced several novels and appeared on HBO's final season of Def Poetry Jam, but also a powerful educator and community builder. Her parents were born and raised in Milwaukee, meeting at UW-Whitewater, but her father was commissioned by the Army when she was young, and she moved from place to place in the US and the world as his career required. Returning to Milwaukee as a young professional, she took a job as the director of the Black Achievers, a college preparedness program at the Northside YMCA. After seeing poetry performed in an intimate setting at a bar called The Main Event with a group of coworkers, she was inspired to combine her passion and talent for writing with her drive to make real improvement in the community.

Initially she opened the Mecca Nightclub as a venue for poets to perform which attracted talent from all over the country, but seeing the need to make poetry and writing more accessible to kids, she created the Still Waters Collective to focus on "the three Cs—community, capacity, and confidence" in its young participants. Through that organization, she has been able to provide literary arts programming to schools and other organizations for two decades. From this work, she was recently named a Rubinger fellow, receiving a grant to expand her work of building strong urban networks for creatives to rely on, and connecting the community to the arts. In June, she was awarded $50,000 from the American Academy of Poets to create a Milwaukee Youth Poet Laureate program, identifying poets from local schools to participate in a contest with the winner being named Youth Poet Laureate and receiving money for school or to start a business.

In addition to her work with Still Waters Collective, she is also engaged in a number of other projects. She was twice selected as a US Embassy Arts Envoy, traveling to Mauritius and Botswana to offer poetry workshops and more. Her stage show Makin Cake with Dasha Kelly, which juxtaposes chefs measuring ingredients and baking a cake while she tells cake-themed stories related to inequity and exclusion was halted due to the Pandemic but is expected to be performed as part of a traveling show in 2022.

It is best to experience her work live, so here she is reading 2 of her poems, Hope is a Bruise, and Bones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0Q4pKabdJQ