My guest today, Joel Leon, is a performer, poet, musician, author, and storyteller, born and raised in the Bronx in the eighties and nineties, at a time where sort of dueling narratives define this part of the city, considered at once at the center of a crisis of drugs and violence, while also being a deeply connected community and with a strong sense of family and devotion.
From the earliest age, art, performing, and music became both a refuge and a source of creative expression for Joelle.
He'd eventually land a spot at the famed New York High School for Performing Arts, where Joelle continued to hone his performance chops.
But driving it underneath was always this fierce devotion to language and writing that led him, over the intervening years to become a powerful voice and public storyteller, especially from the moment that we find ourselves now in as a society.
His message and his craft led to appearances at the legendary Apollo Theater, on the Ted Stage, Today Show, Joe's Pub, Rockwood Music Hall, Columbia University, NYU, and so many others.
And over the last decade, straddling the worlds of commercial writing in the advertising and creative space, while also deepening into essays and books, Joel has carved out his place as a master storyteller, always leading not just with craft, but infusing his writing with performance and unfiltered honesty about everything, from his struggles with his own self worth, relationship with his dad, his lens on fatherhood, mental health, and especially now, much needed stories and insights around race and activism and justice.
We explore all of this and more in today's moving conversation.
Cannot wait to share it with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is a good life project.
There's been a lot of trippy shit that's been happening.
I think the world is on some other shit right now.
That's a good way to describe it.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like everything is upside down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But maybe it maybe like that.
Maybe that's what gets us to a place where we're right side up.
Maybe.