Hip-hop academy

First Wave scholars break ground on campus and beyond

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When Kelsey Van Ert (“Kelsey Pyro”) was a freshman in college, she got a phone call that changed her life — an offer of a full-tuition scholarship to UW-Madison.

Van Ert isn’t an athlete. She is a spoken word artist, who raps, rhymes, sings and breakdances. And she has the distinction of being one of the first students to graduate from a Big 10 university — or any major university — as a hip-hop scholar.

Van Ert was recruited in 2006 by Josh Healy, a campus activist and performer, who called her to explain that the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (OMAI) was launching a program called First Wave.

“It was like winning the lottery — of college,” says Van Ert, who was not happy at her private liberal arts college in Minnesota.

Van Ert transferred to UW as a sophomore and became part of the “first cohort” of First Wave scholars, a program that has recruited some of the brightest stars of the nation’s burgeoning spoken word movement, luring them with a full ride to a majority white Midwestern university.

Beyond the significant financial contribution, the benefits for these young artists — whose passions are nurtured by their faculty and peers — are incalculable. But the relationship goes both ways: The UW, which has struggled over the years to recruit and retain students of color, has developed a national reputation for First Wave, whose performing troupe has wowed audiences nationally and internationally, and whose scholars are active on campus and successful academically. This Friday and Saturday, students will perform at the “Passing the Mic” event at the Overture Center. The annual hip-hop showcase has become a key part of the Wisconsin Book Festival.

First Wave also works with the UW’s education school, which is on the cutting edge of developing a culturally relevant curriculum. This extends the reach of the program nationally, says Willie Ney, co-founder of First Wave and executive director of the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives.

“[First Wave] is giving tools to educators and leaders to be able to speak the language of the hip-hop generation.”

Van Ert first caught Ney’s attention at a youth poetry slam in San Francisco in 2006. “She was one of the very best young poets I had seen up to that time,” he says. “She was truly transcendent.” Van Ert, who is multiracial, was a senior at St. Paul Central High School in Minnesota, a diverse, low-income school. Afterward, she traveled to Madison and won the “Passing the Mic” poetry slam.

Van Ert graduated in 2011 and now lives in New York City, where she juggles artistic commitments with work as a professional teaching artist, including a coveted spot with the Urban Arts Partnership’s Fresh Prep program, which uses hip-hop pedagogy to help students pass the New York Regents Exams. In 2014, she was invited to present a TEDx talk at International University in Antalya, Turkey, on how breakdance facilitates intercultural dialogue.

Van Ert aims to make her living as an artist — a natural choice for someone recruited on the basis of her poetic gifts — and she’s not saddled with debt from her college years. “I don’t have to find some high-paying full-time job that sucks my life away,” says Van Ert. “I can focus on what I want to do with my life and make my dreams come true.”

But not all First Wavers aspire to careers in the arts. Van Ert’s peers have fanned out across the country into grad schools, nonprofits, K-12 schools and community centers. Some of them decide to go back home to teach and work in low-income schools.

The philosophical underpinnings of First Wave inform their work in whatever career they choose. First Wave’s democratic and student-centered approach to education is being replicated around the country, including by the leadership at the Boys & Girls Clubs of America — which sponsors two First Wave scholarships and comes to a summer institute for educators called Hip Hop in the Heartland to train in culturally responsive techniques.

Amaud Johnson, a creative writing professor and published poet who sits on First Wave’s academic advisory board, says freshmen in his required creative writing workshop arrive with confident voices and clear ideas about what they want to address in their writing. Still, he says, “I’ve seen them grow by leaps and bounds in the course of a semester.” Johnson pushes them to focus their work and check out writers they might not otherwise read.

He says First Wave has an impact far beyond the individuals who benefit from the scholarships or witness the performances. “They are small, but their voices are large, and there’s a significant echo,” says Johnson. Art dictates culture, he adds, and these outspoken young people are sparking conversations around important issues, including controversial ones. “Poets are thinking about things that matter. It helps us process who we are as human beings.”

“On the one hand that might create some tension in terms of what it means to have uncomfortable conversations,” says Johnson. “But I think in the end those conversations have been healthy for the university, and I think we’re better because of First Wave.”

A white guy who went to a “basically all-black” high school in Indianapolis, Willie Ney’s storied life includes stints in West Africa and revolutionary Nicaragua.

In the late 1980s Ney embarked on a decades-long mission to bring art, music and activism closer together. He landed in Madison after serving as the tour manager for Soul Vibrations, a reggae band from Nicaragua, which played the Memorial Union Terrace in 1989.

In 1991, Ney entered UW’s graduate program in Latin American Studies. He helped create Sin Fronteras, an innovative Latin American curriculum for the Madison schools, and launched the city’s World Music Festival. In the mid-’90s, he brought in Afro-Latin music legend John Santos for a semester at the UW.

Santos turned him on to the spoken word phenomenon, which was flourishing in the San Francisco Bay Area under the umbrella of an organization called Youth Speaks. For Ney, it was a pivotal moment: “I brought in a whole team of spoken word artists: Tammy Gomez from Texas, Maria Teresa Fernandez (“Mariposa”) from the Bronx, Paul Flores from the Bay Area. We did a showcase at West High School,” says Ney. “I took a risk, and it was this astonishing moment where 2,000 kids listening to poetry were just at the edge of their seats. That changed my life immediately because they were saying real stuff. Here’s an art form that engages students and talks about real issues, social justice issues. And we can access schools.”

Ney began organizing spoken word events and programs in Madison schools and slam teams that traveled to the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival, a mecca for youth poets.

Ney wondered what was going to happen to all those talented and socially engaged poets after high school. “They had these great slams, students had their voice, they competed. They were brilliant. But what do you do with 19-year-olds?”

Meanwhile, another issue continued to gnaw at him. “We were bringing all these diverse artists in, but the campus was so white,” says Ney. “So what are you gonna do? You don’t complain about it; you do something about it.”

That something was First Wave. In a late-night conversation in June 2004, Ney pitched his idea to Darrell Bazzell, vice chancellor for finance and administration: “We could recruit these kids, we could give them a scholarship, and we could have the most brilliant minds right here.” The two traveled together to Youth Speaks in Los Angeles, and put together a budget for a program. The idea of a hip-hop scholarship rapidly worked its way up the university’s food chain, and by the fall of 2007, First Wave welcomed a diverse group of spoken word poets from around the country to the UW’s hallowed halls.

Ney compares First Wave to other prestigious academic awards. “There needs to be a Rhodes scholarship of hip-hop, an epicenter, with a world-class institution that’s very difficult to get into,” says Ney. “It’s very aspirational for students that come into ‘Passing the Mic,’ who get to feel the culture and this vibe.”

Some of the brightest lights at the UW serve on the program’s faculty advisory board, including Jamaican-born dancer Chris Walker and education professor Gloria Ladson-Billings, credited with revolutionizing the idea of culturally relevant pedagogy. In a 2014 article in the Harvard Educational Review, Ladson-Billings credited First Wave with “bringing hip-hop out of the margins.”

“We are in a moment, culturally and historically, where a particular art form has been in existence for 40 years. It may not be a fluke, right?” says Johnson.

He believes accepting hip-hop artists into the academy is overdue, and that it represents a seismic shift in the world of higher education. “What we understand in terms of tradition is being expanded,” says Johnson. “There are different voices, different bodies.”

The Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives turns 10 this year, but the traditions of spoken word stretch back to African slave narratives, African American preachers and civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Sojourner Truth (“Ain’t I a woman?”). During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, jazz, blues and poetry began to cross-pollinate. The Black Power movement of the 1960s birthed The Last Poets, and the first documented poetry slam took place in 1989 at New York’s Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Hip-hop itself began when Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc spun records at a Bronx birthday in August 1973. The youth spoken word movement, which Ney and Healy started to track, thrived, particularly in urban high schools starting in the 1990s.

Like hip-hop itself, First Wave is a synthesis of these traditions, and recruiters look for youth poets and activists who can meet UW’s stringent admission standards and epitomize First Wave’s “three pillars”: art, academics and activism. Although First Wavers have majors all over the map, their educational experience is tailored to create multidisciplinary artists and leaders. They get a head start on college with the campus-based Summer Collegiate Experience (SCE), and they move through a series of courses together freshman year, designed to expose them to different art forms and service learning. They participate in arts- and education-based internships, and develop multimedia performances. Some of them tour internationally with the First Wave Hip Hop Theater Ensemble, and they populate myriad student organizations.

The UW currently has 64 students on First Wave scholarship, and has graduated another 62. According to Ney, the vast majority of scholarships have gone to first-generation, lower-income black and Latino students. But they have also gone to several white and Southeast Asian students. This year, for the first time, a scholarship went to a student from China.

First Wave is the only UW program to win a Governor’s Arts Award in Wisconsin, and in 2009, on Gov. Jim Doyle’s recommendation, it won a national Governor’s Arts Award. The students do seem to thrive.

Since the program’s inception, according to a June 24 report prepared by the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, 43 students have studied abroad, 17 graduates have pursued masters and Ph.D.s, two have graduated from law school, many have received awards and teaching fellowships, three have been Gates Scholars, and four have given TEDx talks. Many First Wave grads are pursuing work in education and nonprofits, creating a ripple effect that has yet to be measured.

Sofia Snow, one of First Wave’s more famous alums, has opened for DMC and been featured in the Boston Globe and Cosmopolitan. But she graduated in social work and works at Urban Word in New York City, the hub for that city’s spoken word movement. Similarly, Camea Davis, who earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 2011, became interested in education, earning a master’s degree at UW. She returned to her hometown of Indianapolis, where she teaches middle school and is working on a doctorate degree. Her research focuses on how using slam poetry in middle schools can improve educational outcomes. “I saw First Wave as my opportunity to be financially sustained and also grow my artistry in the process,” says Davis.

For many high school poets, seeing First Wave in action makes them want to come to the UW. In 2012, while still a senior at Rufus King International High School in Milwaukee, Deshawn McKinney traveled to Madison with his slam poetry team to participate in “Passing the Mic.” “I think it was all women that performed that night. I was just blown away,” says McKinney. “They had the best raps, and they were singing and they were doing poetry — all this talent was concentrated into this entity that is First Wave. There was something really magical about that weekend. I just remember thinking I want to throw my hat in the ring.”

He was weighing Northwestern for journalism against UW, but getting accepted into First Wave tipped the scales: He chose to study English and creative writing here.

Once on campus, though, McKinney found the lack of diversity on campus challenging. African American students made up 3% of students at UW for the 2014-2015 school year. McKinney’s high school is 84% non-white.

McKinney wasn’t alone. “What surprised me most about UW-Madison was the lack of cultural competency,” says Ashley Thomas, a senior majoring in social work, who grew up in Harlem. “It was a culture shock moving to the Midwest.” 

McKinney says First Wave provides an important outlet for students of color who face “micro-aggressions” and even racist incidents. “It allows you a release, which I think is really important,” he says. “It allows you to cope, and it allows you to find community.”

McKinney credits First Wave with developing his critical thinking skills. “It’s not like you’re just writing poetry or dancing or rapping. You’re also thinking about the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ and the ‘what,’” he says. The program also expanded his world. He had never traveled further than Chicago before coming to UW. “That’s what happens in cities in impoverished places,” says McKinney. “People know their eight-block radius, and they don’t know anything outside of that.” McKinney has since studied in London, and he spent last summer in Shanghai. In the spring, he’s hoping to study in Tokyo.

Garrett Pauli, a first-generation college student who grew up in a multiracial family in Phoenix, also broadened his horizons through First Wave. “I didn’t think I’d go to a four-year university. I got here and had never even heard of grad school,” says Pauli. Now he’s teaching writing workshops with the JVN project, a local independent arts outreach program staffed by First Wavers, and studying sociology. He hopes to earn a doctorate and become a professor. “I don’t really have the experience or the people to call on to help me with that, so I fall back on people within First Wave. I owe a lot of my growth and opportunity to First Wave.”

Initially, much of that support can be found on one floor in Sellery Hall. The Studio: UW Madison’s Creative Arts and Design Community  — a joint operation of University Housing and the UW’s Arts Institute — is home to 64 students who choose a residence hall experience dedicated to creativity. All freshman First Wave scholars are required to live there. Think Fame in the hip-hop age. The floor includes theater students, writers, visual artists, dancers and budding scientists. The Studio is one of 10 “Learning Communities” on campus that allow students to choose a dorm floor based on their interests.

A well-used black box theater that includes a dance floor and professional theater lighting provides a safe space for students to try out performances among their peers, and residents also have access to several studios where they can create visual or digital art. “We just take all arts and put them on a floor of 64 people, and it just thrives,” says PF’anique Hill, a junior, who is a housefellow in The Studio.

Hill says the First Wavers are a close-knit bunch after spending seven weeks together in the Summer Collegiate Experience, and once they get to the floor, the energy spreads. “They’re loud, and they’re glad to be here,” says Hill. “You see First Wave separate and sort of spread that energy to the rest of the floor. It’s like magic. There’s creation. It’s the arts floor, so there will be art happening.”

“Part of what First Wave does is ask the questions: What do you care about? What is your work about? What is your culture?” says Marina Kelly, program director at The Studio. “It’s just so wonderful for that to be a core part of the conversation. It makes it easier for us to get to know them and for them to share themselves, and to be in community with us.” The UW can be daunting for any freshman, says Kelly. “This huge university is made so much smaller because they get to come home to a place where they are known.”

John Hitchcock, an art professor and faculty director of The Studio, says the collaboration that occurs in the spaces is essential for developing artists. He and Kelly lead a weekly survey course for residents, bringing in guest artists and lecturers. And, for all the residents, watching the First Wavers develop their art — and collaborating with them — can be transformative.

For Hitchcock, the performances are a reminder of what brought the students to the UW in the first place: “It’s power,” says Hitchcock. “When they come in to perform, first you’re listening, then you’re feeling it, then you’re grooving to it, then the next thing you are immersed in it, and you’re taken into the hurricane. You’re in. That’s what this is about.”