SAUL WILLIAMS
SPOKEN WORD ARTIST AKA SLAM POET SAUL WILLIAMS
Saul Williams is driven. A New York native whose life's journey has taken him to school in Brazil, where he learned Portuguese by translating Public Enemy lyrics, Williams is an accomplished student of Moorhouse University, where he earned a degree in drama and philosophy, and New York University, where he obtained a graduate degree in acting. But those accomplishments are Williams' less-public achievements.
Williams is known primarily as a poet whose voice began echoing through New York City in the early- to mid-1990s. He quickly gained notoriety as a powerful writer and speaker whose stage presence was as captivating as his words. He was a subject of the 1996 Slam poetry documentary film, Slam Nation, and had his poetry excerpted on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. With his work on the stage as both an actor and a poet, it seemed only natural that Williams began acting in front of the camera. As the co-writer and star of the 1998 feature film, Slam, filmed in a Washington D.C. jail cell, Williams gained national acclaim as a writer and actor.
Slam went on to win the grand jury prize at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival.
In 1999 and 2000, Williams turned his attention back to music, a pastime he gave up on during his late teens when he stopped writing rhymes as an MC and moved into poetry. Over the last couple of years, Williams has been hard at work on Amethyst Rock Star, his album debut. The music is very urban, live hip-hop music featuring Williams' words of love and wisdom, strife and struggle. These days, says Williams, he's mostly invested in his music, personally and artistically, and though he may be primarily known as Saul Williams the poet and actor, Saul Williams the songwriter and musician is now gaining recognition for his thoughtful and emotive music.
"I don't think I get a lot of noise-makers," says the humble Williams from a hotel room in Eugene, Oregon. His live music show, which landed in Chico last week as a part of the Sno-Core Icicles Tour, is different from his upcoming spoken performance, but it seems as though fans treat each show with the same pensive interest, rather than with whistles, hoots and hollers. "The difference is that with me, people are always trying to hear the words, and I don't really do any type of like, 'everybody say ho!' so I don't know if that's the sign we get, but definitely lots of interested people."
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