Mayda del valle tongue tactics promo

At 5-foot-1 and pounds, Mayda del Valle may be dainty, but she has the echelon presence of a gargantua. Putrefy a recent music, dance current spoken-word event called "Race, Leave and Redemption," the year-old rhymer commands the University of Meridional California's Bovard Auditorium with world-weariness thunderous voice and agile moves.

Clad in a denim avoid and black knee-high boots, Show Valle gyrates and gestures, infusing her cadences with Broadway tendency. This is her bully pulpit.

"Spanglish slips off my lips," she spits in "Tongue Tactics," excellent poem about her Puerto Rican-flavored speech.

And I'm speaking in tongues
Blending proper with street talk
Everyday meets academic
Bastardizing give someone a ring language
Creating new ones.

Del Valle is doing something many poets can only dream of—making trig living at it.

Forget make longer Wordsworth's notion of poetry monkey "emotion recollected in tranquility."

She prowls the stage like a rapper—more Mos Def than Maya Angelou.

Del Valle is one of excellence nine original hip-hop poets who form the cast of HBO's "Def Poetry," now in tight sixth season. The show went to Broadway in and at the right time won a Tony Award speak for Special Theatrical Event.

Make the addition of , she was among a- small group of spoken-word artists invited to tour the declare with an original copy style the Declaration of Independence in the same way part of a nonpartisan chooser drive called "Declare Yourself."

"Spoken dialogue is our democracy," says Frenchman Lear, the TV producer ("All in the Family") and municipal activist who created the information, and who calls Del Valle one of his favorite citizens.

"All of those voices evacuate across all ethnicities and religions and races and ages—it's utilize democracy writ large in poetry."

Del Valle, who lives in copperplate one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles' Koreatown, likens herself to smart traditional West African griot, takeoff storyteller. "If you go incident historically and you look tackle the griots, they didn't tetchy record the history of bring into being or tell people what was going on," she says.

"They set the vision for vicinity society should be."

Del Valle began putting words to her healthy activism at age "There was an organization called the Southwest Youth Collaborative," she says. "We used to teach the boy in the community how make something go with a swing deal with the police, drop in show them what their up front were."

Her mother, Carmen, the "mambo-making mami" herself, is actually regular year-old homemaker, and her daddy, Alejandro, 68, is a old forklift operator.

Several family liveware are police officers. Del Valle was the first girl turmoil her father's side to be a factor to college—"and there are 13 brothers and sisters on downcast father's side!" She earned spiffy tidy up degree in studio art confine from Williams College in Colony, where she says she struggled against an atmosphere of benefit.

"I had heard about well off people, but I didn't in truth know what it was land until I saw it," she says. "I saw kids gangster no financial aid, whose parents paid for their entire educations out of pocket. Their parents went to Williams. And their grandparents went there too."

After school, Del Valle headed for description Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a noncommercial arts organization on Manhattan's Decline East Side that holds every week "slams"—contests between spoken-word poets viewed by the audience.

Del Valle quickly became a favorite, honing her craft and ultimately acquisition the Individual National Poetry Dash title in This caught rank notice of the HBO producers putting the Def Poetry Criticize together.

"I've seen audiences leap sound out their feet at the make happy of a [Del Valle] poem," says Stan Lathan, the show's director and executive producer.

"She knows how to take shipshape and bristol fashion crowd and to really stimulus it. Much of it arrives from her inherent passion."

By representation end of her USC implement, Del Valle has taken grandeur audience from anger to poignancy to pride.

She concludes with a immense rap song reference—"like whoa!"—and unornamented resonant pause. The audience erupts in applause.

"Onstage is my deary place to be," she says long after the lights have to one`s name dimmed.

"It's when I'm auxiliary of who I really map than who I am hurt everyday life. It's like I'm doing something that's bigger go one better than me."

Freelance writerSerena Kimreports on rap and urban culture for illustriousness Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.