Darius Ajai Frasure knew that in an effort to be a poet, he wanted to be a professor.

True to plan, he’s a full-time English and inventive writing professor at Dallas School and in addition teaches on the College of North Texas-Dallas, Texas Christian College in Fort Price and Tarrant County School. He’s at present engaged on his Ph.D.

His poem “We, Us, Our” was impressed by his ideas of marriage “whenever you transfer from the person to the collective,” he mentioned. It was a topic he contemplated for many of his life, from his personal early experiences.

He mentioned his grandmother’s sister adopted him out of foster care in Tuscon, Arizona, when he was 2 years outdated. He attended kindergarten within the Philippines, because of his father’s Air Pressure posting. Later, his mother and father divorced, so he was raised again in Tuscon in a single-parent family.

Processing ache with poetry

He wrote his first poem in sixth grade, impressed by Edgar Alan Poe’s “The Raven.” His different early inspirations embody rap music and the King James model of the Bible.

He used poetry to course of his ache, grief and pleasure by writing his inventive musings in a journal—his first remedy, he mentioned.

“I did not have a private life expectancy past 21,” he mentioned, “as a result of…inside my peer group, lots of people had been being killed or locked up then.”

Frasure enrolled in Paul Quinn School in Dallas “as a result of my household principally did navy,” he mentioned. “Earlier than navy service, it was sharecropping and coping with the segregation of society. After which earlier than that was slavery.”

Inspiring future poets

In school, he mentioned he realized that he had a knack for working with younger individuals. His purpose has been to assist youth course of their experiences and make sense of them to “uncover, affirm, validate, share” their voices.

After graduating, he taught English at Carter Excessive Faculty in Dallas. He mentored college students within the artwork of poetry, instructing them how one can write and recognize it by taking them to spoken phrase venues. Tommy Raps, previously referred to as So-So Subject, is one in every of his former college students.

He’s lively in working with DaVerse Lounge in Dallas, a venue for youth beneath 21 years outdated that includes music, visible arts and spoken phrase efficiency.

What’s subsequent?

These days, he mentioned his focus is on his publishing firm, Guarantee Press, “empowering writers into authors.”

An lively member of the Dallas literary group, Frasure writes fiction and inventive nonfiction, in addition to poetry.

His personal ancestry contributed to his first ebook, “of stone and twine”—poems reflecting on the African American expertise and the way descendants have been affected.

Frasure mentioned there’s a photograph of his great-grandfather “Grandpa Dan,” celebrating his one centesimal birthday, surrounded by generations of household. A paragraph explains that Grandpa Dan acquired 100 acres in Texas close to the place he had been enslaved after which turned a sharecropper.

“It’s form of a quick, actual footnote in historical past,” he mentioned of his household. “Everyone is aware of this factor, and we hold telling the story.”

Methods to see extra of Darius Ajai Frasure:

• Fb: Darius Frasure 
• Instagram: @dariusfrasure 
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