This jawn right here called street lit


 

 

The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 6(1/2), 2022 
ISSN 2574-3430, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi 
DOI: 10.33137/ijidi.v6i1.38154 

This Jawn Right Here Called Street Lit 
Vanessa Irvin, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA  

Keywords: hip-hop; libraries; literacy; poetry 

Publication Type: Special Section - Creative 

This jawn right here called street lit 

This jawn, street lit, is story: 
… stories that come from real lives lived on avenues, sidewalks, and corners interwoven, 
intersecting, and connected as crossroads on the stage of life, 

… stories about human beings who walk, talk, and think, laugh, cry, and drink, fight, make love 
and raise kids, sometimes right on stoops and porches under the stars of night, 

… stories about communities where money can be seemingly scarce or - found flowing 
underground a mainstream economy...as above, so below. 

This jawn, street lit, is truth: 
… truths remembered and told creatively, realistically, authentically, uncompromisingly, and 
unapologetically ... because street lit fictions are necessary, 

… truths for the thick-boned and thick-skinned ... told in everyday language by everyday writers, 
thinkers, dreamers, ex-cons and wifeys with voices screaming to be heard...and so - they scream, 

… truths readers read, and see, and hear, and feel, and listen to in libraries, in schools, and 
passed hand-to-hand like contrabanded literary combat in the street, broadsides now code. 

This jawn, street lit, is audacious: 
… for people from the hood who document stories as an expression of the spectrum of life as it 
is lived, everywhere, 

… for authors to read their own lives and then to write that shit out from the abyss of melanated 
imaginations...morphing reality into memory so it doesn't have to be lived or survived anymore, 

… for readers to see their lives reflected in story, as they gasp, laugh, ooo, and ahhh,  
shucks … as readers breathe … while heightening their literacy practices by osmosis, the act of 
reading realized. 

This jawn, street lit, is magical: 
… for authors of hip hop who create literature as life in text, 
… for scholars of hip hop who arrive at the revelation, “I think they call that jawn “genre,”  
… and, for all of us, the practitioners of hip hop, readers of the stories of life. 

 

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi


This jawn right here called street lit 

 

The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 6(1/2), 2022 
ISSN 2574-3430, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi 
DOI: 10.33137/ijidi.v6i1.38154 

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Vanessa Irvin (irvinv@hawaii.edu) is an Associate Professor with the Library and Information 
Science Program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii. She is the current 
editor-in-chief of The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion (IJIDI). 

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ijidi
mailto:irvinv@hawaii.edu

	This jawn right here called street lit