MEET KENNY
When Kenny looks back on his beginnings on Detroit’s east side, where a village of beloved Black women and elders first wrapped their arms around him, he recalls their stories in vivid detail, as if you’ve slipped through a wrinkle in time with him and all his favorite characters from the past are right there.
Like his iron-willed maternal grandmother, kept alive by her children’s memories of all the mischief she made and the hell she raised on fools who had it coming. Or the grandfather who drove him to school every morning, using his memories to transport them back to his Alabama youth along the way. Or the aunts who came of age in the days of hip-hop’s fluorescent 80s and 90s and who never missed an opportunity to get fly, always performing the alchemy of taking whatever life’s given you and leaving something fabulous in its place.
There are many things to say about Kenny’s journey up this point—his awkward beginnings in a world that demanded conformity and obedience to traditional masculinity he was never suited for, or much interested in. His early obsessions with pop culture, celebrities, cartoons and superheroes (“I was a NERD”). His time at the Cass Tech High School paper, and Michigan State’s Odyssey, and his first tastes of semi-professional storytelling. The single mother doing her damnedest at every step along the way. The apprenticeship with the Detroit Free Press, or his communications work at Michigan State’s Office of the Provost and the atmosphere of racism and homophobia that permeated the place and drove him back into the arms of telling the stories of “people who are like me” and beat the odds to “become the people who they were meant to be.”
And in this way, it all flows back to the communities he loves the most: the women and queer folk and elders he first sat at the feet of and learned how tell stories from before he even realized that this was the actual apprenticeship that would alter the course of his life. It’s these everyday giants of the Black oral tradition who first gave him a North Star to follow on a quest that’s led to countless stories in places like Blavity News, Forbes and Essence Magazine on Black life, survival, art and self-creation, and a stampede of interviews with celebrity artists, actors, and entertainment icons.
When the talk show he deserves finally comes, and it will come, you can expect more of what’s made Kenny such a sought-after and admired voice up to this point: his dedication to the idea that every one of us deserves a life as rich and colorful as the stories our beloveds passed on to us.
