Jon Kelly was a homeless 17-year-old high school senior in Miami when he joined the Army to provide for his fractured family.
Since the second grade, he had been putting his feelings down on paper — first in simple rhymes, then winning essay contests — to make sense of life happening around him. Substance abuse, domestic violence, incarceration.
Kelly kept his writing to himself, out of shame, fear of judgment. But it was sustenance for his vulnerable mental health.
“That was my first therapy. Writing it. It was therapeutic for me just to get it out of me,” Kelly says.
Around the same time as his stretch in the Army (he was injured and discharged about a year into his service), Kelly shared one of his personal pieces with someone who, to the surprise of both of them, realized they were living the same experiences.
“We bonded. And then that was my mission, to start sharing this work more. Because I didn’t know other people can be healed through these words. I started performing everywhere, hitting open mics and sharing more openly,” he says.
With a bright personality and an easy laugh, Kelly is now a prominent performing poet in South Florida, the host of the monthly Poetry Open Mic night at the Arts Garage in Delray Beach. He is the author of the poetry collection “Trauma Monsters” and, by day, works as the arts program coordinator at Concept Health Systems, a nonprofit alcohol and drug treatment facility in Miami.
Under the stage name JonKeL, he also has been a frequent contestant at Southern Fried Poetry Slam, a touring annual festival now in its 32nd year that will bring more than 200 poets and performers from around the country to Pompano Beach from Wednesday, June 12, to Saturday, June 15. Kelly is serving as assistant director of this year’s festival.
MORE THAN POETRY
One of the largest performance poetry tournaments in the world, making its return to Florida for the first time since a Tampa festival in 2012, Southern Fried 2024 will include workshops, open mics, yoga, a beach party and other events centered at the Pompano Beach Cultural Center. Tickets cost $25 for a four-day pass.
Southern Fried is a regional festival that has taken place in cities including San Antonio; Louisville, Kentucky; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Greensboro, North Carolina. It does not require poets to come from the South, and organizers are expecting competitors from as far away as California and New York.
The slam poetry genre is a competition, with timed readings in front of a live audience and a panel of judges, so Southern Fried will offer high-energy entertainment, with champions crowned and prizes handed out.
But it’s also about an art form, real-time storytelling steeped in joy and anger and sorrow, illustrating how creative expression can bring healing and order to lives turned upside down by personal issues or societal dysfunction.
Sarita “Sincere” Goods, a poet, performer and president of Southern Fried Poetry Slam based near her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, believes that as communication becomes more visual, written and spoken words are even more important.
“Poetry is easily one of the most varied forms of expression. It’s an energy you have to be present for,” Goods says.
“A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words, however the breadth and the depth of those words are really based on who’s using them,” she says. “You see a meme and you chuckle at it, but the power in conversation? The ability to connect with people? The way that people are able to hear you tell your stories and realize they are not alone in the situation that they are in? That’s priceless.”
Poetry has long played an important role in asking questions about America’s social and political schisms, including the work of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Galway Kinnell, Amiri Baraka and Bob Dylan.
Kelly says rivals in competitions around the country expect Florida poets to bring unique introspection to the table.
“Florida is in the spotlight when we’re talking about things that are happening nationwide,” he says, laughing. “It would be irresponsible to be an artist and not address those issues.”
Goods believes poetry is an underappreciated forum for debate on social issues and possible solutions.
“It’s very difficult to have those conversations. No one walks up and says, ‘Tell me your thoughts on racism.’ But if you’re listening to a poem and it comes at you in a way that’s not necessarily argumentative — it’s coming from a place of ‘I just have to express whatever it is that I have that’s pent up’ — sometimes that makes it easier for opposing opinions to come together,” she says.
POETRY IN ACTION
If you are curious about why Southern Fried Poetry Slam 2024 is coming to South Florida, look no further than Pompano Beach poet and playwright Sharonda “Eccentrich” Richardson.
A tireless advocate for poetry and spoken-word events in South Florida, Richardson is the creator of the annual Exit 36 Slam Poetry Festival, which attracted an appearance by Tarronia “Tank” Ball of Tank and The Bangas in December.
Also the organizer of the nationally ranked Exit 36 Poetry Slam team, Richardson currently serves as vice president of the Southern Fried Poetry Slam board of directors. She also uses poetry as part of her prison counseling program, Free on the Inside.
All the more impressive for a mother of six children who, 20 years after she first arrived at the University of Florida, in March returned to her studies at the school and is on track to receive a degree in educational technology next summer.
Pompano Beach born and raised, Richardson hopes Southern Fried Poetry Slam changes the conversation about the city as a cultural tourism destination. She thinks the arts are a tool that can solve bigger problems.
“I really believe that the arts can change the world. I really believe that it is a catalyst for change and dialogue, a way for people to see that we’re more alike than we are different,” Richardson says. “It saved my life, so surely it could save someone else’s life.”
Richardson was first exposed to “the sport and the art” of poetry after winning a competition sponsored by the Black Student Union at UF, but didn’t throw herself into the writing full time until 2013 after her husband’s suicide.
“That was a very difficult period. I pursued the arts full time and got into poetry, and just kept going deeper and deeper,” Richardson says.
Poetry led to writing plays for the stage, and developing a curriculum for using the arts to teach lessons on mental health.
Her introduction to slam poetry in 2015 was less about art than day-to-day practicalities.
“I was a single mom, and I needed tires. There was a slam in Delray where you could win $100, and you didn’t have to pay an entry fee. I ended up winning that slam and the $100 for my tires, and then I got into the slam scene,” Richardson says.
Her work with Free on the Inside takes place with prisoners at Everglades Correctional Institution in Miami. There, she teaches things she’s learned in slam poetry: effective communication, self-awareness, the importance of body language when you’re speaking.
Richardson, who describes her childhood as “sheltered and privileged,” began the program nearly a decade ago after learning her estranged biological father had been in and out of prison.
She also was motivated by her own life experience: Richardson was about 20 years old, homeless and the mother of a young son when money she had saved for an apartment went missing. She was determined to get it back “by any means necessary,” briefly ending up in jail and facing a 15-year prison sentence.
“By the grace of God I got out of that situation and it changed my life,” she says. “That really opened my eyes to how young adults can make terrible decisions and end up in a place that is not an indicator of who they are.”
TIME TRAVELING
Kelly does similar work counseling young people who are facing many of the issues that he grew up with. In recommending the healing properties of writing, he makes his case in two parts.
“You don’t need to be a poet to write poetry. You write for yourself, part one, and when you’re comfortable and brave enough to share with others, part two, you can do that. But you never have to move onto part two. You can just write for yourself forever and use that as your outlet,” Kelly says. “But just know that there are other people going through the same thing you’re going through, and once you’re brave enough to share that with the world, you can heal even more people than yourself.”
Kelly continues to examine his challenging childhood with the understanding of a grown man, a writing process he calls “time traveling.” His counseling can also take him back in emotional ways.
“Some of the same things come up with the youth that I’m serving. So I write about that stuff, too. I mean, I wrote about an encounter with a youth that I had a few months back, that I could not stop crying from,” Kelly says, with an uneasy laugh. “This 15-year-old young man was going through something I experienced 30 years ago. The only way I could stop crying was to write about it.”
Kelly now lives in Port St. Lucie, more than 90 minutes from his job at the nonprofit, where no one is getting rich. Still, he loves the work. What does he get out of it?
“Hopefully, productive members of society?” he says, laughing. “I will give you these tools to help you in your life, but all you’ve got to do is be a good human being, you know? Hopefully, one day, maybe mentor somebody, too. Pay it forward. That’s the goal.”
IF YOU GO
WHAT: Southern Fried Poetry Slam
WHEN: June 12-15
WHERE: Pompano Beach Cultural Center, 50. E. Atlantic Blvd., and nearby venues including Ali Cultural Arts Center and Bailey Contemporary Arts Center
COST: $25 for festival pass; $15 for workshop pass
INFORMATION: PompanoBeachArts.org
Staff writer Ben Crandell can be reached at bcrandell@sunsentinel.com. Follow on Instagram @BenCrandell and Twitter @BenCrandell.
