Equity In Art

Hunter has written throughout her life but until eight years ago she’d never thought about performing her poems in front of an audience. That changed when she experienced her first spoken word performance.

“[I] saw just the energy in the air and the light in people's eyes, and I said, 'Hey, I wonder if I could do something like that to get my point across and not just writing, but also emotionally speaking,’” she said.

She decided to give it a try in 2012. The first spoken word poem Hunter ever performed in public was dedicated to her late mother, “Momma May I,” at the former XL Lounge in Cleveland’s Gateway District.

“That night, I couldn't even make it through the piece. I cried on stage. I didn't know if it was something that I would want to do, because it just was so emotional for me. But the spoken word community, the poetry community, the audience that was there, really held me up,” she said.

The audience connected with her story and the other poets encouraged her to come back and share more of her poetry.  Soon Hunter was getting offers to perform and started to get paid for those performances.

“My first point of interest was to get across a message to people and then it was, ‘Oh, I can make a little money doing this as well? That's awesome.’”

Hunter said she’s blessed to have had mostly positive feedback about her poetry. But a recent poem struck a nerve with someone in the audience.

After recently performing her poem,“Black Lives Do Matter,” a young man approached her to say that he didn’t agree with its message and that the poem didn’t speak globally enough about all the aspects of the issue.

“I wanted to hear his point of view. That is actually the point of the piece, to start a conversation,” she said. “He took a different view, but we were able to have an open dialog, which I thought was great.”

When Hunter's two children heard the poem for the first time they went to their mom and embraced her and told her how proud they were. It was one of the best moments of Hunter's life, she said.

Hunter’s children Marshall and Leah were born in Akron and now are grown. After divorcing her husband, who since passed away, Hunter moved from Akron to Cleveland to be closer to her day job.

After the move, Hunter went on to compete in and win the annual Hessler Street Fair Poetry Contest, a longstanding Cleveland event. Her poems were published in subsequent contest anthologies.

She’s currently recording her latest poems as an EP and “mini-visual” album in hopes of releasing them in early 2021.

One of those most recent poems, “Onward,” looks to a little known piece of African-American history from the 19^th century – The Freedman’s Bank.  Established by the U.S. Congress in 1865 to help recently emancipated African-Americans, the bank collapsed less than a decade later taking millions of invested dollars with it.

“If you think about it, how many families would be in different situations today if that money was available to them, as it should be?” she said.

Through her poetry Hunter said she hopes to provide information like this to others who might be exhausted and turned off by news coverage of current events.

“You see things going on in society and you want to get people excited about it or give them knowledge,” she said. “There has to be a way to enlighten people, you know, other than the norm.”

Hunter likes to write romantic poetry as well and doesn’t consider herself “super political.”

“But when you live in this skin that I’m in, it causes you to be more aware of the injustices going on around you because you’re living with and through it,” she said. “My ultimate goal is to leave this world knowing that I did my best to improve circumstances for my children and grandchildren.”