Alycia Kamil

Delacreme Scholar Spotlight Class of 2021

By Raja'nee Redmond & Bragard Kizenga

How would you describe your work?

I do writing, painting, and visual art. I have a platform called Undoing Our Erasure. I do a lot of the digital graphics for that page. I started that about two years ago. Then having to make the graphics I was like, actually, I think this is kind of fun. I also do some beading, I make earrings, waist beads, and necklaces. I run a business with my best friend, we co-run it together, it's called water beads. And then aside from that, the main focus of my creative projects was writing. I started doing different short stories when I was younger, and that just kind of evolved into taking different forms. So I participated in a Louder Than A Bomb. That was kind of like my break into really doing like spoken word and poetry performances. Then that kind of moved into when I started doing organizing work, I started writing op-eds or pieces. So then that kind of got me into that field. So I'm kind of just like, all over the place, but in a good way, because I'm just kind of making whatever is coming to me at that moment.

Can you give me more context about your life at the time when you were applying for the scholarship?

This is when I really wanted to get back into writing, I feel like I took a really long break from any creative stuff I was doing because I was very focused on organizing efforts, from about 2017, up to 2021, I was doing a lot of on the ground work. I was in a couple of gun violence prevention organizations and different campaigns across the city. You get a chance to be creative in that space, but it's also like, you only really get to talk about those particular topics. So it kind of made me not want to write or even perform because if you weren't performing, you're performing actions and rallies. After I kind of took a break from that and started doing my own stuff, I kind of found a lot more time to just like, oh, well let me write this poem for fun. And I was like, let me just send some poems that I just worked on.

How would you say the scholars has impacted your journey as in as a multimedia artist?

I think it really gave me an affirmation to get back into writing. I feel like for a while, I wasn't really receiving gratification for the work that I was doing that wasn't attached to what I was doing for other people. So a lot of the projects I was working on, if I wasn't doing something like for somebody else, or if it wasn't me writing this for "something" I wasn't really getting the "oh like Alicia, these were good pieces". Just getting the affirmation of somebody being like I liked the pieces that you write really is just like yeah, like I'm a good writer, aside from writing for other people or something else, so it definitely helped me get like the confidence back up to just write more. After I got the scholarship, I ended up writing a couple of pieces with Southside weekly. I have some other pieces up for another publication. So I just really got me back into the vibe of writing for other people technically, but mostly what I want to write about and for myself.