“WRITEous Intent” (A Scribe Called Quess)

A Scribe Called Quess? is a poet, educator, actor, playwright, and activist in that order. He is a 2-time national slam poetry championship title winner and founding member of Team SNO (Slam New Orleans), New Orleans’ three-time national champion slam poetry team. His accomplishments with Team SNO have earned him honors from the Mayor of New Orleans as well as from City Council. He is a two-time Slam New Orleans Semi-Finals Slam winner and New Orleans Museum of Art Slam Champion.  His poetry led him to the classroom where he has served nine years as an educator having served as an English teacher, Humanities teacher, Instructional Coach, and currently a Librarian and Poetry teacher. His work as an educator and youth worker has been highlighted on NPR in the Voices of Educators series and even taken him to Oxford University to speak on school reform. As an actor and theater maker, he has written for and acted in several plays including plays with Junebug Productions (Voices from the Back of the Class, Lockdown, Gomela), ArtSpot Productions (Rumors of War), Urban Bush Women (Summer Leadership Institute 2009), and other esteemed outfits. In summer of 2014 he was awarded a residency at the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans as a part of the inaugural class of the DISTILLERY, where he work shopped his first stage play, “Crossroads,” which is still in development. In 2017, he directed and debuted his first one-man show “Sleeper Cell: a stage performance based on the book by A Scribe Called Quess?” in the In Fringe Festival of New Orleans.  As an activist, he co-founded BYP100 NOLA, a young adult organization that advocates for the protection of black youth from state sanctioned violence. He also recently co-founded Take Em Down NOLA, a coalition of organizers and activists committed to the removal of white supremacist monuments, school names and street names in New Orleans. As his work as an artist and educator has always explored issues of social justice and systemic racism, his work as an activist has offered the perfect opportunity for his arts and pedagogy to meet action.