Although spoken word artist Devynity is just barely old enough to legally drink, her career is as long as many of the veterans in the genre. She's competed in the spoken word National Grand Slam finals, and has had all the drama associated with being in a group as well watching it break down.

Devynity began her career almost accidentally. She first began writing at the age of 13, but wouldn't get her start as a performer until she was 15. One Sunday, during church services, the young lyrist read a poem to the congregation and was approached after services by a fellow parishioner named Brenda.

Brenda told Devynity and her grandmother that the budding artist could very well have a strong future performing as a career. In almost no time at all, Devynity was performing on Queens' public access television.

Performing as a poet, quickly gave way to her performing as a emcee. While she'd always had a love for the art form, she had never considered it to be something she could do, until a friend pointed out "Here you're spitting it like they do."

At the tender age of 16 Devynity began rapping and performing at New York's own Nuyorican Poets Café.

Devynity explains with a husky laugh, "I didn't know about the history of the Nuyorican, or how it important it was. The first time I performed there, it was off season and I had no idea about the slam team, or anything."

That would all change drastically in just less than two years. By the time Devynity had turned 18; she had landed a spot on the Nuyorican's Slam Team and found herself at the Grand Slam finals. The experience was great but slightly unnerving.

"There was all of this animosity towards the Neurican team, and nobody had told us, and we had no idea why," she says of the experience.

After her success at nationals that year, the poetess branched out and began working with a musical group named Common Thread. While she enjoyed the time spent working with the group, she ultimately "Felt stifled by having to produce a certain sound," and that she "Didn't want to feel repressed."

Being freed of the group's constraints Devynity has found creative freedom in her solo performances.

Recently, she performed at Simmons College in Boston. Of that experience - and all of her performances - Devynity says, "[I] try not to preach because I've been in that audience where the poet is preaching, and it's not what I want to do."

More recently, she performed at a rally held at the end of an NYC protest march put on in response to the murder of Sean Bell. The shooing occurred not too far from the poets' home in November. The event having happened, literally, a few blocks away was almost too much for the MC to handle during her performance. "I started crying on stage...thinking... you could be shot down for being who you are."

Not all of her material stems for such harsh realities of life. "[I] flip a page and start writing. It could be about gender and race. It could be about happiness."

She admits, however, that the majority of content she deals with is "about black people in America." Something which she cannot only relate to in her day to day experiences, but also in her academic pursuits as a Black Studies major.

Devnyity is quick to point out, that she's not obsessed with labels. "All of these labels we have are for a reason, just keeping rich people rich, and poor people poor. This country was built on the backs of oppressed people, and nobody gets what they work for."

When asked if she would ever take the opportunity to sign with a major label to help bolster her career she says "Platinum is one million sales, how many millions of people in the world, does that not include?" she asks rhetorically.

There's also the fear of what can happen to ones art when there's a large machine controlling the project to consider. She sites what happened to Lupe Fiasco's last album as her prime example. Lupe's album was delayed repeatedly in spike of that fact that leaked tracks had become available online, the end result was disappointing sales of the album when it eventually was released.

At the same time, she's quick to admit, "If Jay-Z wanted to sign me, would I say no? I'd have to think about it...[but[ I don't know if I could sacrifice whatever it is takes to be apart of something like that."

Ideally "I'd like to be on an indie label, if any label at all... I'd still like to do it my way and sell a bunch of records."

[The following poem is reprinted with the permission of the author]

For Sean

By: Devynity

I couldn't bring myself to write a lie for Amadou

For fear that my lines would be too convoluted

Not like any other emcee would address him in their music

But the poets would slam wit poems about 41 shots and win prizes

And it didn't seem right for me to profit off a Black man's demise it

Never occurred to me to write a tribute to Sandsbury

Honestly I'd become sedated by the hatred

To say that 5'0" is an occupying force in my hood is an understatement

But like the rest of us I'd been desensitized

I walk past homeless folks all the time

And never think twice

Another Black person dies every time I blink twice

But I never occurred to me to fight

We talk of revolution in the rhymes that we write

But its just a euphemism for change

We waitin for it to come

Like a bus that doesn't run

And wonder why we still standing in place

I've heard it said it doesn't pay to complain

Fightin for policy is like fightin for an apology

When honestly, we're the ones feeling sorry in the end

I know folks who know that it's messed up in the projects

But they don't want to speak out for fear of dying in the process

Cuz Black life is value like pennies with holes in them

Expired bus passes and no credit classes

I represent the Hip-Hop generation, we listen to rap, have unprotected sex, drop out of school and raise bastards

Cuz' we fatherless too

We listen to our ipods

And head-nod cuz its medicine

And they make money off our misery

Take for instance the pharmaceutical industry

They revel in our sicknesses

Cashing off of AIDS like Africa is the Carter and they Nino Brown

Counting antibodies til the last Pookie falls down

But now Sean Bell is dead

And Nicole is all alone

And she had to tell her babies that daddy wasn't coming home

And they shot at him 50 times

I guess they threw that extra 9 for the ones that 50 cent survived

Poor Sean is gone

And he's never coming back

He was young and he was gifted and intelligent and Black

And he's another victim: but we're still hear

And we're sleeping in the sewage but we gotta wake up this year

Cuz they'll keep killin us until we're no longer visible

No Hip-Hop, no soul food, no kwanzaa principles

Waiting for another Malcolm to speak but in the interim we're miserable

Our Eyes Are Watching God, waiting for a miracle

But God made us and His creations are divine

Before them shots multiply we need to stand and mobilize

There will be no Trail of Tears for us no casinos - no reservations

Just gun toting, crack distributing, money hungry racists

They'll take away the welfare; take away the rights

Take away the freedom, take away our lives

And we'll be having babies in disease-infested wombs with no one to raise them

No one to praise them

Just conservatives and pseudo-liberals left to raise them

This is for Nicole because she loved him so

Sean Bell R.I.P. the Black man we all know