At age 20, Brown student Scott Poulson-Bryant was every parents’ worst nightmare: he dropped out of college. He moved to New York to pursue a career in journalism, starting at the Village Voice, and working up to the creation of Vibe magazine in 1992, where he served as one of the co-founding editors. After 15 years as a hip hop and urban culture journalist, profiling some of the most well known names in rap and R&B and covering some of the biggest cultural phenomena in the 90s and 2000s, Poulson-Bryant returned to Brown, where he decided to pursue a teaching career. This fall, Professor Poulson-Bryant found himself at Fordham, teaching an undergraduate Texts and Contexts course titled “Good Kid/M.a.a.d City: Urban Identity(s) in American Literature and Popular Culture” and a graduate seminar in African-American theater. I sat down with the latest addition to the English department to discuss his life, journalistic pursuits, and ultimate choice to teach.
What inspired you to pursue a career in journalism?
The shortest answer is when I was in school I was always a good writer. I was awful in math; I was awful in science; I was awful in everything, but for some reason, I was a good writer. I would do well in my English classes. I was editor of my high school newspaper and co-editor of the yearbook. So, when I got to college, I had no idea what I wanted to study, but I knew I wanted to be a writer. So I took time off from Brown and came to New York to see if I could make it as a writer. And, knock on wood, I did. It was just all I liked to do. My mother even tells a story to people that when I was little and first learned how to read, right after I learned how to read, I wanted to write my own stories. I don’t remember that, but that’s what she says. It was just sort of…born in me. I combined what I was good at in school and what I had fun doing, and that’s when I figured it out. That’s it. That’s writing. That led me on the career path I took.
Do you think stepping away from college to work as a journalist impacted your career and success? Did you face any difficulties in the work force without a degree?
“It did. I think the impact of not finishing college had on my career is that it made me work harder because everyone else around me did. I took a year off from Brown that turned to 15 years off, so I think I was working harder, pounding the pavement even harder, to make it happen. Because if it didn’t happen, I would have gone back to college and felt like a failure. Looking back, I wouldn’t have and shouldn’t have felt that way, but that was when I was 20 and how I felt. So, yeah, it stoked my ambition more that I didn’t have a diploma, and that I hadn’t graduated from college. But, the flipside was, life showed me that I didn’t have to graduate from college to accomplish the things I wanted to accomplish. That was either because of the ambition or because of the “talent,” whatever that is, or just because of the desire to really do it. That’s what drove me. I don’t think there were difficulties in the fact that I didn’t have a degree, the difficulties were more in the initial problems in being a freelance writer. Making sure the rent gets paid and electricity doesn’t get turned off. As I tell everyone I ever talk to about writing and about my life, I was lucky to have parents who could help me out every so often. There were a couple of months that my parents paid my rent, paid my electricity and my cell bills, all that stuff, so in that way, I was glad I had family support in this weird, crazy thing I was doing.
Was there ever a time that you questioned your choice to pursue journalism?
No, there wasn’t. I think that’s because when I left Brown I got an internship at the Village Voice, which went well, and then I got a job there, and then I got my column at Spin magazine. Maybe it was luck of the draw, but I had enough successes that I felt like, if I continued working hard, this would work and I could keep doing this. That was more a matter of being so young, because I was 20 years old, and not thinking about the repercussions of what would happen if I failed. It was full steam ahead. So by the time we started Vibe, 3 years after that, it was just a matter of keeping the progress going, and working hard, and being good to people, and making sure that my work was as good as it could be.
Does anything stand out as your favorite piece you have written? Does anything stand out as more challenging? More rewarding?
The piece I wrote about Voguing that [my undergrads] read. That was the first national piece written about it and I didn’t know that at the time when I was doing it, I found out later. So that made me feel like, as a person who covered youth culture and popular culture, that meant I knew how to keep my ear to the ground, which is something you have to do as a journalist: you always have to be hearing the story. In that way, I’ve always been proud of that piece. My Puff Daddy piece, which I also assigned to [my undergrads], I really liked that piece, too. Partly because before I wrote that piece there weren’t a lot of articles about black executives and talent. The big magazines like Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair and Spin and others didn’t do a lot of coverage of black artists like that, and at Vibe, that’s what we wanted to do. So that I could write this article that won numerous awards and that opened up the space for other black writers to come through and write profiles and stuff like that always makes me sort of proud. Those are the two that really stick out from early on in my career.
What made you want to step back from your career and return to school? Did you intend to become a professor when you went back or is that something you decided along the way?
In 2006, I had just finished my second book, and I was about to start writing my novel, and I was working at this magazine called Giant. I met this kid who was an intern named Zach who went to Yale. He was a great kid. I was in charge of the interns, that was part of my job as one of the editors, and we just had these great conversations. I realized in having these conversations with him that I missed that from college, like those intellectual conversations you have with people that you don’t really have in the real world. I realized I misssed talking to people like that. Like really smart people who read books. So, I went to have dinner with my folks and I said to my father, ‘What if I got my BA after all these years?’ and he was like, ‘Well, we’ve given up hope that you ever would, so if you want to, you should go for it.’ So I wrote Brown a letter and was like, ‘listen, I dropped out like 15 years ago, I had this whole career, but I want my BA, what do I have to do?’ And they said, ‘well, you can come back here and finish or you can stay in New York and go to Columbia.’ And I said I was going to come back to Brown. So I went back to Brown and I was like the oldest senior in history. But it was a good thing because it made me recalibrate my priorities. In some ways, I felt like, as a journalist I had said everything I had wanted to say and interviewed everyone I wanted to interview. By that time I was writing books, which was sort of the next step. Going to Brown did two things: it clarified what I wanted to do with the next step of my life and it also showed me that there’s no door that’s ever closed. You make mistakes, things happen, you get thrown these curveballs, but you can always look back and try to find a way to do the things you wanted to do. You’re never too old. When I graduated from Brown, they asked me to teach for a year. That was completely fortuitous. I was done being a journalist, so I guess I’ll be a teacher for a year, and I loved doing it. So much so that I started to apply to PhD programs because I figured if I was going to teach, I wanted to do it whole hog. I wanted to get the PhD, get hired somewhere, build relationships with students. That taught me I clearly can’t take time off from stuff. I took time off from Brown, had a whole career and never went back for 15 years. Went back to Brown to take time off from journalism, never went back. I figured out at Brown, and from talking to interns at the magazine, that I really like talking to young people. I feel like old people get boring and I like hearing new ideas from young people.
How did you decide on the topics for your classes?
I love that Fordham lets me make up my own classes. At most schools, as a new professor, you’re expected to teach the intro courses, the stuff that’s already there, but the moment I came to Fordham, they told me I would make up my own courses and professors were encouraged to do that. So my Texts and Contexts class, my undergrad seminar, I wanted to do a class that would have the texts and literature and film that I studied, that I do my research about. I wanted to do a class that has African-American literature and film, which is what I research, but I also wanted it to be a class that was connected to the real world and the things that are happening in the world we live in, and not be some arch, formal thing that students feel like they have to study. I wanted it to be something students want to study and have fun with, but learn about the world. Like cross-racial exchange is really important to me, and I think white people should talk to black people and we should talk across races and across gender and across sexuality. I figured a class that looked at urban identity, which is what I study, but in a way that connected it to what we’re experiencing now would be good for undergrads. My other graduate course is about African-American theater, which is something else I study, and my dissertation was partly about that. When I was asked to do a grad seminar, I decided to make it what I research and hope students are interested in it.
What has been your favorite aspect of being a professor?
My favorite thing is the students, hands down. That’s why I do it. A lot of professors are in it for the research because they want to write great books, whatever, but I came to grad school already written books. I know how to do that and I’ve already done that, so I feel like I don’t have to “prove” myself, to prove that I can do that. Ever since being in that classroom at Brown when they asked me to teach that year, there was just something about sitting in a circle with a bunch of students and hearing their lives and hearing what they’re experiencing and teaching them, but also learning from them, just made me feel really good. So, the best part about being at Fordham is meeting all my students, 19 undergrads and 9 grads, so 28 students, and learning from them and imparting my knowledge on them, but also learning from them and their ideas. When I was a grad student at Harvard I lived in one of the dorms for 5 years as a tutor and that was one of the best parts about being a grad student. I wasn’t just around professors and grad students all day, I got to spend time with young people who were confused or awkward or crazy and they were growing and changing and wanted advice and mentorship, which I loved doing. So, yeah, the students are the best part.
Do you have any advice for young people looking to become journalists and writers?
Practice. It’s a cliché to say practice makes perfect, but it’s absolutely true. I tell every student I know that wants to be a writer that the first thing they have to learn is that writing is rewriting. A lot of young writers I meet are really wedded to what they write and they believe that they’re so smart and so good that when they write something it’s automatically so great, and it’s not. It never is. Even Toni Morrison and Joan Didion and James Baldwin, the greats, all do a lot of rewriting. And writing is rewriting. That’s always my writing advice. My more practical advice is figure out your own voice. Someone told me that when I was first starting out and I didn’t really know exactly what she meant when she said it, but now, having done it for 20 years, I get it. Figure out a way in which what you want to say is what you want to say in the way you want to say it. It’s not mimicking someone else. Influence is great, to be influenced by the great ones is great, but find your own voice. Sometimes that takes time, and a lot of people are impatient, so they don’t take the time, but the only way you find your own voice is to practice and keep doing it. I tell every young writer now to start a blog, because a blog is a perfect place to practice without anyone seeing it until you want him or her to see it. Until you want it to go viral, until you want others to look at it. Those are my three pieces of advice for young journalists.
Professor Poulson-Bryant taught at Rose Hill this fall semester, but he will be coming back in Spring 2017 at Lincoln Center. He will be teaching his Texts and Contexts: Good Kid/M.a.a.d. City (ENGL 2000: L06) course again, as well as a creative writing course titled “Flawless/Freedom/Formations: Writing About Race and Popular Culture,” (ENGL 3014: L15) which still has spots available! You can find his books What’s Your Hi-Fi Q?: From Prince to Puff Daddy, 30 Years of Black Music Trivia, Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America, and The VIPs: A Novel all on Amazon.