Young Innovator Profile: Maya del Valle

At 155 centimeters and 50 kilograms, Maya del Valle may be petite, but she has the stage presence of a Gargantua. At a recent music, dance, and spoken-word event called "Race, Rap, and Redemption," the 28-year-old poet commands the University of Southern California's Bovard Auditorium with her thunderous voice and agile moves.

Del Valle is one of the nine original hip-hop poets who form the cast of HBO's Def Poetry, now in its sixth season. The show went to Broadway in 2002 and promptly won a Tony Award in 2003 for Special Theatrical Event. In 2004, del Valle was among a small group of spoken-word artists invited to tour the United States with an original copy of the Declaration of Independence as part of a nonpartisan voter drive called "Declare Yourself."

"Spoken word is our democracy," says Norman Lear, the TV producer (All in the Family) and civic activist who created the program and who calls del Valle one of his favorite people. "All of those voices from across all ethnicities and religions and races and ages — it's our democracy writ large in poetry."

Del Valle, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles's Koreatown, likens herself to a traditional West African griot, or storyteller. "If you go back historically and you look at the griots, they didn't just record the history of people or tell people what was going on," she says. "They set the vision for where society should be."

After college, del Valle headed for the Nuyorican Poets Café, a nonprofit arts organization on Manhattan's Lower East Side that holds weekly "slams" — contests between spoken-word poets judged by the audience. Del Valle quickly became a favorite, honing her craft and ultimately gaining the Individual National Poetry Slam title in 2001. This caught the notice of the HBO producers putting the Def Poetry jam together.

"Onstage is my favorite place to be," del Valle says, long after the lights have dimmed. "It's when I'm more of who I really am than who I am in everyday life. It's like I'm doing something that's bigger than me."

This article is excerpted from "Mighty Mouth" by Serena Kim, which originally appeared in SMITHSONIAN, October 2007. Freelance writer Serena Kim reports on hip-hop and urban culture for the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.