jessica Care moore is an award-winning poet, musician, and playwright. In 2024 she was named by Detroit’s Poet Laureate by Mayor Mike Duggan and the Ford Foundation. She is the Executive Producer of Black WOMEN Rock! (Daughters of Betty), CEO of Moore Black Press and the Director of The Moore Art House 501c3.  She has recorded with  Nas, Common, Jose James, Jeezy, Jeff Mills, Karriem Riggins, The Last Poets and more.  

We spoke with her about her new role as Detroit’s Poet Laureate, and the importance of poetry and arts education in democratic societies in the face of federal attacks on arts funding.

DC: How did you first come to poetry?

I feel like it’s been in my body with it my entire life. I feel like I’m always catching up with it. When I look back on my childhood I was a scrappy young girl in the streets and I had brothers and I was just trying to keep up with them so I was very athletic and I loved animals. But I was very dreamy, even at like 7, 8 years old. Lots of deja vu, lots of staring at the clouds. I was very curious about the world and how it works. So I think a lot of us are born poets.

But then figuring out how to make a living as a poet is a whole different thing, how do I make it my life? But I always felt like I knew I was a writer early on, I read a lot. My mother ate books when I was growing up, she would just fly through them. She didn’t read nonfiction, she read poetry, memoirs, and biographies, so those were the books that I had access to. She gave me Alice Walker and Lorraine Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. I think I got those when I was in 6th or 7th grade. And when I got to high school, my drama teacher, Susan Story, brought For Colored Girls by Ntozake Shange into the black box theatre and I was a part of a theatre troupe out of Cody High School at that time. At that point I knew Maya Angelou and Sonia Sanchez and other writers, but they weren’t teaching Black Arts Movement writing, they weren’t teaching the Harlem Renaissance, they might have taught us Langston Hughes and some Zora Neale Hurston, but not really in a deep way.

And so when Ntozake’s For Colored Girls came into my life, and I wasn’t in the play I was just sitting there in the audience, and I was like, “whatever this is…oh my god,” and so I went to the Detroit Public Library on Joy Road, and the rest is herstory. I found everybody: Audre Lorde, the Black Poets Anthology that Dudley Randall had edited, Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, people who would later go on to be my friends and mentors. Like Jayne Cortez was my friend who I got to know and who put me on festivals and whom I love dearly. 

So I think it was always there waiting for me, I just had to connect the dots.

DC: You’re an artist who works across multiple media— music, acting, writing—-what does poetry specifically mean to you and offer to you?

For me its all a poem. Even my feature film, He Looked Like a Postcard, it really feels like a long poem with a narrative added. I think its a type of filmmaking that I’m excited about and haven’t seen a lot of people do and I plan on doing more of it. Its definitely poetry helping to tell the story and adding to the story and building characters around this. 

Even with my rock band—me and Steffanie Christi’an had this great project, We Are Scorpio, which is in my opinion is one of the most baddest poetry records ever that has rock and roll as its base music—but if you take all the music away on that record, those are poems. They are poems that I can put into a book.

Unlike some poets and spoken word artists, I wanted to be respected as a poet and writer, and that’s why I started a publishing house in 1997. I created Moore Black Press because I wanted to be taken seriously. The fact that I’m a Poet Laureate now is something that didn’t seem possible to me because I was radical, I wrote from the heart and I wasn’t paying attention to the line breaks, but I knew they were there and I was well read enough to be crafted at writing. 

But I also challenged the people in that world often on panels early in my 20s talking about “page vs. stage” and all this mess and I was like, “I’ll get down on all these spaces,” I can write books but I can also perform and have a full band behind me and have a dance quartet. And why not because Nikki Giovanni worked with orchestras, Amiri Baraka had blues bands, and Jayne Cortez had the Firespitters, so poetry and music—we’ve been doing that.  So I didn’t understand why the disconnect, and why I could’t be a writer who was respected in poetry spaces by poets who were only about writing books. And that’s fine if that’s what you do, but this idea that because I can do this other thing and because I sound good reading my poetry makes me less of a writer and more of a performance artist—it is something I have pushed against my entire career, and now it is very satisfying to be a Poet Laureate.

DC: What are the opportunities and possibilities that most excite you about being the Poet Laureate of Detroit?

Its getting young people excited about poetry. This year for me in general is very youth focused. My first children’s book comes out June 24, Your Crown Shines, and its being published by HarperCollins’ Amistad Press. Its a poem illustrated by Dare Coulter that I wrote for Ketanji Brown Jackson. 

But my focus for Detroit is to get as many kids as possible to make poetry cool for them. For me having to find poetry in high school and later, I want kids who are in elementary school in middle school to know that poetry belongs to them and that they don’t have to go outside of themselves to find it, that it can look like them. So I have a huge campaign that I’m launching called Detroit Love Haiku. It’s going to be interdisciplinary, we’re going to have people from Detroit Pistons, to storeowners, to elders on our block, to students writing what they love about Detroit in 17 syllables. We’re going to write the haiku, and then record it, and then I’m going to commission painters to do a mural along with the haiku. 

I also have my “Make Poetry a Public Art” campaign, where I want to start seeing poetry on busses. This is definitely something I’m mirroring from an amazing program called the Mural Arts Program in Philadelphia, and I’ve watched what they did with Sonia Sanchez, and I want Detroit desperately to embrace this level of support for the literary arts and for our stories. You see the visual arts and music get it, but very few writers and poets get that same support. I want to see poetry on posters, on busses, on the People Mover, the QLine.

DC: Do you think there are social and political responsibilities to being the Poet Laureate of Detroit, and if so what are the ones that are most important to you?

Being politically and socially connected—that’s who I am already. That’s not something that I’ve become, that’s something as a poet and write that I’ve made a decision to be connected to what’s going on in the world, in Gaza, in the Congo, in Sudan, what’s happening to our people affects how I write, how I think, how I live, how I post, how I get shadow-banned. I think its my responsibility to not be silent. I advocate heavily for Black womens’ voices which are very silenced in the city. I have been personally silenced by corporations in the city and I know its for my politics. 

I did Black Women Rock in 2024 and used all my Poet Laureate money to support it and pay for it on my own. I had no corporate sponsors. So I’m responsible for being self-sufficient, for finding ways around the madness, and for being a voice for our young people, for women in general, being a voice for reproductive rights. I’m not a poet writing art for art’s sake, I’m connected to things that are happening to us, like what’s happening with the NEA. It’s heartbreaking.

DC: You’ve really set up my next question perfectly—at a time in which we are watching public arts institutions being almost if not completely defunded, what do you see as the role of art in a democratic society? Why might art and writing actually be important and worthy of government support in a free and democratic society?

You’re talking about gutting the cultural landscape of the country. We are the ones who tell the world who we are in the most beautiful way, through poetry, dance, music, visual art. This is our best representation of who we are. So when you gut the very thing that is the heart and soul of the country and keeps humanity connected, it gets past race and gender, it gets past boundaries. 

You want the country to be soulless, it blows my mind. Thank you Bruce Springsteen, and other artists who are very privileged white artists, who are standing in the light and saying “no this is insanity”. We are the cultural fabric that defines this place. Without us there is nothing here, without the arts and without the funding of the arts.

Poetry for many, and music, are some young people’s only way of expressing themselves in a thorough way. Every child isn’t an oratory contest winner. Sometimes they need to write and journal, and there’s nothing to support those programs and people in general who don’t have access to the arts. That changes lives when you put a recording studio in a school, or when you put a black box theatre in a high school with funding and set design materials. It changes lives. It changes how young people see the world and see themselves in it. That’s what art does, that’s what it did for me. And without my black box theatre, without anyone in my school caring that an art program existed, without those things what kind of people are we going to be?