One of Derrick Harriell’s earliest memories growing up in Milwaukee is his father playing classic Marvin Gaye records and then quizzing the young man on the lyrics. What story was being told? Why did he use this word and not that one?
“I wanted to get an A on the dad soulful Marvin Gaye exam,” Harriell recalls now with a laugh.
Harriell, now 46, has turned the unexpected passion those lyrical tests gently sparked into a career in words. A professor of English at UW-Milwaukee and the author of four collections of poetry, Harriell gained attention this year as the co-author of The Voice in My Head Is God, the New York Times bestselling memoir from Grammy-winning rapper 2 Chainz.
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Harriell – who returned to Milwaukee with his wife and now-13-year-old son in 2024 after 12 years teaching at the University of Mississippi – often uses musical metaphors to describe his poetic voice. His first collection, Cotton, is “blues” poetry, while his third, Stripper in Wonderland, leans toward the celebratory atmosphere of “funk.” But for The Voice in My Head Is God, he took on the unmistakable cadence of the Southern trap legend, née Tauheed Epps.
Harriell vividly remembers the surreal moment he was asked to co-author the Atlanta rapper’s memoir. “I had just been listening to his new album on the treadmill.”
Harriell went into the project expecting a few Zoom interviews, but instead 2 Chainz’ team insisted on multiple trips to Atlanta to spend time in person – and the contract mandated that those studio visits be from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. The unusual hours had Harriell anticipating “popping bottles,” but instead he found that 2 Chainz, who Harriell describes as a “devout family man,” was intensely dedicated to working through the night.
“When you sit next to someone and talk to them for hours on end, you see how they hold their head, how they move,” Harriell says. “That might not become explicitly written in the book, but it allows you to see more of the soul and spirit of the person.”
When it came time to write, Harriell – who can do an eerily accurate impression of the rapper – says he found himself almost “method acting.” He would slump in his chair, holding himself the way he saw 2 Chainz did. “It was kind of a spiritual embodying.”
Today, Harriell tries to bring that spirit of uninhibited creation to his classroom. The most important thing isn’t just teaching the material, he says, but creating a vibrant space where his students feel free to create.
“I convey to my students that, ‘I’m going to allow you to be all of you, and I’m going to be the most authentic version of me,’” he says. “Every time I’ve tried to write something that wasn’t me – when I was faking the funk – I wrote trash. … When I’m writing something that I care about, that matters to me … I write my most quality work. Doing that [for my students], providing them with that kind of space – that’s when I see amazing writing.”
