As a kid growing up in Milwaukee, poet and professor of creative writing Derrick Harriell fell in love with words through discussions with his father. “A lot of those conversations were rooted in music,” he said.
His dad played artists like Marvin Gaye, Anita Baker and Stevie Wonder, challenging Harriell to decipher the meanings behind their lyrics. While the songs often dealt with breakups and falling in love, he learned at a young age to appreciate the tales that lyrics could tell.
“That’s when I got really interested in storytelling,” Harriell said. He began to write poems and secret love letters to girls he was too shy to talk to in middle school. In high school, he took inspiration from rappers like Jay-Z, Foxy Brown, and the Notorious B.I.G., making beats with friends around the lunch table.
Harriell carried that love of words to UW-Milwaukee when he enrolled as an undergraduate in 1999. One night, he popped into an open mic event at 8th Note Coffeehouse in the UWM Student Union where performers shared spoken word poetry.
“I had never seen anything like that,” Harriell said. “That, for me, was a bridge between the quiet poems that I would write to myself and my interest in rapping.”
Decades later, Harriell is an established author, professor, poet and occasional MC. He was a member of the hip-hop trio Black Elephant, which released “Eat This Album” in 2004. Since that record came out, Harriell has earned a doctorate at UW-Milwaukee, published four books (with a fifth on the way), and spent the past 18 years sharing his love of words with the next generation.
Coming home
After 12 years as a professor at the University of Mississippi, Harriell decided it was time to move back to Milwaukee in 2024. “There’s no other community that means more to me than Milwaukee and the people of Milwaukee that have shaped and molded me.”
This new chapter gives Harriell the opportunity to see the city with fresh eyes and mentor students who are growing up in the same city he did.
Some of that work will be done through Harriell’s role as the interim director of the Black Student Cultural Center, which supports students through academic coaching, mentorship and professional opportunities. He’s also teaching poetry workshops.
In every course he teaches, Harriell thinks of the “new me’s” that come into the classroom. By providing the same support to today’s students that he had as a young poet, he hopes to open doors for aspiring writers. “It required a lot of support to live out my dreams,” he said. “I want to give that back.”
A radical space of love
In his poetry workshops, Harriell sees about a 50/50 mix of students who are English majors and those who are not. He’s determined to leave students with a positive experience that allows them to see poetry — and academic spaces — in a new light.
Harriell aims to create a “radical space of love” where students walk away feeling good about the time spent in the classroom. “Our job is to serve our students as people and as humans first,” he said.
He makes a point to check in with students before class starts to see what they need that day. Maybe it means going outside or decompressing with a fun activity before diving into formal classwork.
While he’s currently focused on general poetry workshops, Harriell spent years immersed in blues poetry, a genre that encompasses universal themes of struggle and determination.
“We all know what it means to suffer,” he said. “We all know what it means to be sad, and we all know what it means to find catharsis, or a way of releasing.” In a similar way, he hopes that students see that poetry is for everyone — and that they leave class with the tools they need for self-expression.
