Overview

""In My Older Brother, A Famous Rapper, Alyesha Wise invites us into stories that are as raw as they are healing. Through themes of family, identity, and peace, Wise transforms pain into resilience and fracture into unity. This remarkable collection is both intimate and universal-a testament to the strength we discover in our shared humanity."" -Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X, author, community organizer, social activist, and motivational speaker ""With My Older Brother, A Famous Rapper, Alyesha Wise delivers a memoir in verse, a carefully structured mixtape of testimony on what it means to be seen, erased and then resurrected. It's a collection that demands more than it asks. Unapologetic and wavering. A commitment to truth telling. And if that's not what poetry should be, then I don't know what poetry is."" -Shihan Van Clief, Tony Award-winning HBO Def Poet and co-founder of Da Poetry Lounge ""Alyesha's poems are love letters to every young person raised on concrete streets and 90s rap songs. They are an ode not just to her brother, but to every little and older brother that brothered us, to every rhyme that raised us, to every lyric that rose our own internal Lazarus, to every childhood memory that carved us into our own church. Her work both cradles us, as well as calls us to face our own mirrors until we become better versions of ourselves. This collection is our favorite rapper's favorite poem, our favorite poet's favorite rhythm. This is the music that both reminds us of where we have come from, and that also calls us back home. And we'll be singing this song, forever."" -Barbara Fant, author of Joy in the Belly of a Riot: Poems, Prayers, Memories, and Meditations (HarperCollins Publishers, 2025)

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Reviews

""You can take the girl out of the hood, but not the hood out of the girls heart. These poems are music for the hip hop kids of the 90's who nodded our heads to rap videos, watched the stars get rich with their hubris on a beat, saw the grit and vulnerability of each artist and said, ""I can do that-I can spit bars too."" This one is for you. Dangerous with the pen, Alyesha brings you back to the street you grew up on, back to 11 and 14 and 17. She resurrects our kin in the details and dares you not to pay respect. A literary chin check by one who shall not be messed with. She writes like she can fight, but knows the value of a life. A gracious rap battle to witness that leaves you humbled, and ready to start the whole album, or book, from the top."" -Shannon Matesky, actress, producer, director and writer ""My Older Brother, A Famous Rapper is a carefully made mixtape filled with color and heat. This collection aches, howls, hollers, spits, nods its head in recognition, and remembers. The poems compel the reader to look and look again, finding beauty in every corner and fall in love with the music of it."" -Suzi Q. Smith, author of A Gospel of Bones (Alternating Current, 2021) ""My Older Brother, A Famous Rapper will transport you to your childhood bedroom, remembering the posters of your idols on the walls, hearing the murmuring or shouting of parents and siblings reverberating through the house, and listening to the music that made you, for the first time. Alyesha Wise's description of her hometown of Camden is as passionate and vivid as Kendrick's representation of Compton on good kid, m.A.A.d city, her poems about childhood are as visceral and tender as the tape recordings cut into Sage Francis' Personal Journals, and her closing section ""Outro"" is filled with as much heat and conviction as Biggie's Ready to Die. Like the track ""Outside"" on Childish Gambino's Camp, Wise's My Older Brother, A Famous Rapper is a heartrending call for both personal and societal transformation in the wake of familial estrangement. Alyesha Wise spits like a righteous preacher at the pulpit as an advocate for prison abolition, justice reform, and LGBTQ+ rights. Like Lauryn Hill, Wise comes with ready aim at the justice system and toxic masculinity alike. Wise implores us all to ""break away"" and to ""break through,"" these systems of oppression so that we might all live in a just world, the type of world where she might finally be free to write about ""rain,"" ""the summer sun,"" and ""friends in flower fields,"" instead of childhood dreams deferred, and ""a climate that reeks of death."" -David A. Romero, author of My Name Is Romero (FlowerSong Press, 2020) and Diamond Bars 2 (Moon Tide Press, 2024)

Author Information

Alyesha Wise is an award-winning, published poet, educator & speaker from Camden, N.J. Currently residing in LA, she is the Director of Programming for Street Poets, Inc., an organization mostly serving juvenile injustice-involved youth with mentorship and arts programming. Alyesha has been featured on platforms and in publications such as OWN TV, BET, LA Times, Bustle, Afropunk, PBS, Buzzfeed and more. Other collabs include the ACLU, The Shabazz Center, The Nantucket Project, Brave New Films and the Google Interstellar Project. Ron Howard once wrote about Alyesha's work, ""Very Powerful."" Matthew Cuban Hernandez is a poet, emcee, speaker, actor, and performance coach from Jacksonville, Florida. He has toured as far as Abu Dhabi and nearly every major city in the United States and Europe, performing, teaching and coaching poetry. A teaching artist for over 15 years, Matthew has spent the 10 ten years working in youth detention centers across Los Angeles County, currently serving as the Director of Juvenile Programming for Street Poets, Inc. In addition, he is a current Lead Teacher and Co-Founder of Spoken Literature Art Movement. Cuban has opened for artists such as Wu-Tang, performed for platforms such as BuzzFeed and NPR and even appeared on the award-winning television show, Better Things. Matthew is also a three-time Southern Fried poetry slam champion and an award-winning poetry coach. Cuban's favorite activity is making people feel great; sometimes he does this through hip hop and poetry. PAGES matam (They/He), is a genderqueer med-school dropout turned award-winning multi-hyphenate who was late to their own birth (aka almost didn't survive) after a near 11-months pregnancy. Now, they strive to create timely and timeless stories centering Black & Queer characters who defy the odds. Fluent in five languages, they are a published poet and spokenword artist, burlesque performer, high-concept drama TV writer, pleasure advocate and agent of imagination born and raised in Cameroon, Central Africa who then blossomed in Washington D.C. (Piscataway Land). PAGES loves anime, mario kart and fried plantains as much as developing character-driven projects centering Black and queer folx exploring their complicated relationship with parents and grief that teaches us it's never too late for self-discovery. Their writing, merging West-African folklore and magical realism with hood mythology, is fueled by their cultural and immigrant experiences as well as Toni Morrison's words: ""the function of freedom is to free someone else.""

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