(gentle music) - When someone encounters my work, I hope they recognize the humanity within themselves.

(gentle tones) (gentle music) Hello, my name is Kenieha Boren or Kenny Rae.

I am a poet and spoken word artist, as well as an educator.

So the work started actually with a poetry essay I wrote called "Pre-Fragmented Bullets," which is about the war against the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and religion.

I also have OCD, which is obsession and compulsion disorder.

I would receive a lot of these intrusive thoughts, like they would be just negative thoughts about me, my past, my family.

And so sitting with those truths and exploring that shadow aspect of myself was very healing.

Like, why?

Why am I still ashamed of my queerness?

Why?

Why do I feel all these religious pressures?

Or, you know, I struggled with the idea that God hates me, or because I was queer and I was the black sheep in my family, because I would say I'm different than a lot of people in my family.

My family's very traditional, religious, southern Black family, and then there's me.

I would say I'm more of a rebel.

I kind of go against societal norms in a way.

And so creating this body of work was very much a reckoning with the internal truths that I was denying within myself, but also it helped me to find the light, and also this work touches on a lot of childhood trauma.

Like I have a piece called "Under the Kitchen Sink," which talks about, you know, me still hearing my mother's voice when she would tell me when I was younger, "Go get the Windex from underneath the kitchen sink," and I couldn't find it quick enough, and she would come down and be like, "Oh, you're so slow.

It's right there in front of your face."

You know, "Why can't you see it?"

And I know like I've been able to forgive my mother for those things, you know, but they still did something to my spirit, and it's still something I'm healing.

And yeah, so this work was very much a confrontation with the internal truths that I had been experiencing and things that I've been struggling with.

But on the other side of that, you know, that journey of writing and healing and you know, processing the internal truths that I was experiencing, I became more whole and I became more honest, and I became the artist.

(gentle music)