Dasha Kelly Hamilton: Creative change agent

She is a writer, performer, facilitator and creative change agent. Dasha Kelly Hamilton was in Mauritius last week for a series of programs. Hosted by the Embassy of the United States, Dasha Kelly Hamilton participated in creative writing classes with authors and aspiring authors, talk with NGOs on how to help children express their emotions through art and discussion with entrepreneurs on the creative industry, among a host of others.

She loves writing and to be creative with words. Initially aiming at becoming a psychologist, Dasha Kelly Hamilton did not expect becoming a successful writer, spoken word artist and creative change agent. How did she get into the shoes of a writer and spoken word artist? “Writing is something natural for me,” declares Dasha. 

She had self-published her first book and was doing work in her community. “I was invited as an author to go into schools. One class became an after school visit and became another school and four schools. And what I learned very early on was, not coming with a degree in poetry or fiction, I did not want to present myself as an expert on all things writing. I just knew I was good at it. And when I went into one of these classrooms, there being 30 kids, I thought that there might have been two or may be three who really cared for what I was talking about and who had any interest in writing or poems. But all 30 of them were by some measure different children because we spent an hour together imagining. None of them were wrong. There is no wrong answer, no wrong idea, no wrong way to do it, no wrong experience. The only way to be wrong was to not do it… It had nothing to do with video games, no gadgets… it was about being creative with words. It was us, our ideas, papers and pens,” she tells us. 

Since then, Dasha has delivered uniquely engaging sessions to corporate teams, arts groups, college campuses, classrooms, correctional institutions, elderly recreational programs, churches, performance halls and conferences across the US. As a spoken word artist, Kelly has performed throughout the U.S., in Canada and appeared on the final season of HBO’s Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam.

It was her love of putting stories together that drove Dasha into doing what she does and since then, she has been doing workshops, participating in conversations with young people, building communities around microphones to getting people interested and encourage them to write their personal stories and being creative. The writer, spoken word artist and creative change agent explains that “creative process mirrors the process of creative thinking. With writing you are not only doing critical thinking but you are also getting clarity on the things that are on the inside. Whether an emotion, a memory. Creative writing as a process lets people be free. It gives them permission not to be wrong, to imagine things in spaces outside themselves, space to see themselves in different places and lives. And this is the core of all the work I get to do and I am most excited to be in Mauritius to do it. ”

Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Public Relations from Illinois State University, a Masters in Marketing Communication from Roosevelt University in Chicago and a MFA in fiction from Antioch University, Dasha has been applying her vast leadership experience and creativity to uplift individual voices and amplify community collectives. During her visit in Mauritius, the writer met with NGOs and social workers on Monday April 10th for a workshop on the theme ‘Storytelling and fiction: Helping young children access their emotions’. The focus, as Dasha explained, was to talk about the different things they bring to their experience in working with children of different ages, how to look at the creative lens as a way to access those children’s emotions, how we can look at the process of problem solving, and so on.

Dasha has written for national, regional and local magazines in the US and has published two collections of her writing; produced four full-length spoken word recordings; a poetry chapbook; and two novels. Her novel ‘Almost Crimson’ has earned strong reviews and has been acclaimed. So we wanted to know what are the difficulties in writing, according to the writer? “It takes a lot of time. But I stop saying I don’t have time… but the big thing about getting down, it is the way I explain poems. A poem is an economy of language. Also the choice of words and verbs is a lot of work. Strong action verb is critical,” she explains. “The writer shares that her favourite word is “if”. Why, we asked. “So many things begin there!,” she utters. 

Founder and artistic director of ‘Still Waters Collective’, an arts outreach and community-building initiative, says that she definitely encourages all, young and old. “I would encourage, first, people to consume more creative writing. If people read a short story, taking in a poem, go listen to people play music, listen to a story, pick up a blog that’s really silly and goofy and has nothing to do with politics or economy and that by itself is going to balance out in terms of a diet. You are what you consume. I evangelise to people to pick up a pen and write something creative. It does not matter if it is going to get sold or people are going to read it or not. It definitely can’t hurt.” Writing, in fact, acts a therapy, she agrees. “You get to escape everything,” says Dasha.