Darius Ajai Frasure knew that in order to be a poet, he needed to be a professor.
True to plan, he is a full-time English and creative writing professor at Dallas College and also teaches at the University of North Texas-Dallas, Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and Tarrant County College. He is currently working on his Ph.D.
His poem “We, Us, Our” was inspired by his thoughts of marriage “when you move from the individual to the collective,” he said. It was a subject he contemplated for most of his life, from his own early experiences.
He said his grandmother’s sister adopted him out of foster care in Tuscon, Arizona, when he was 2 years old. He attended kindergarten in the Philippines, due to his father’s Air Force posting. Later, his parents divorced, so he was raised back in Tuscon in a single-parent household.
Processing pain with poetry
He wrote his first poem in sixth grade, inspired by Edgar Alan Poe’s “The Raven.” His other early inspirations include rap music and the King James version of the Bible.
He used poetry to process his pain, grief and joy by writing his creative musings in a journal—his first therapy, he said.
“I didn't have a personal life expectancy beyond 21,” he said, “because...within my peer group, a lot of people were being killed or locked up then.”
Frasure enrolled in Paul Quinn College in Dallas “because my family mostly did military,” he said. “Before military service, it was sharecropping and dealing with the segregation of society. And then before that was slavery.”
Inspiring future poets
In college, he said he realized that he had a knack for working with young people. His goal has been to help youth process their experiences and make sense of them to “discover, affirm, validate, share” their voices.
After graduating, he taught English at Carter High School in Dallas. He mentored students in the art of poetry, teaching them how to write and appreciate it by taking them to spoken word venues. Tommy Raps, formerly known as So-So Topic, is one of his former students.
He is active in working with DaVerse Lounge in Dallas, a venue for youth under 21 years old featuring music, visual arts and spoken word performance.
What's next?
Lately, he said his focus is on his publishing company, Assure Press, “empowering writers into authors.”
An active member of the Dallas literary community, Frasure writes fiction and creative nonfiction, as well as poetry.
His own ancestry contributed to his first book, “of stone and rope”—poems reflecting on the African American experience and how descendants have been affected.
Frasure said there’s a photo of his great-grandfather “Grandpa Dan,” celebrating his 100th birthday, surrounded by generations of family. A paragraph explains that Grandpa Dan acquired 100 acres in Texas near where he had been enslaved and then became a sharecropper.
“It’s kind of a brief, real footnote in history,” he said of his family. “Everybody knows this thing, and we keep telling the story.”
How to see more of Darius Ajai Frasure:
- Facebook: Darius Frasure
- Instagram: @dariusfrasure
- YouTube