My name is Robert Lashley. I am a poet, playwright, essayist, and critic. I was born and raised in Tacoma, Washington. My childhood was filled with so many joys in regards to literature, music and culture. It was also filled with drug addiction, frightening levels of abuse, severe heartbreak, and too much death to process in a human life. My books (The Homeboy Songs (2014) and Up South (2017) are my way of processing all that, to alchemize the pain and the beauty, and to not do it as therapy, but as an impetus to create idiosyncratic art.