De'Ashia Wallace AJ P.R.
Her work begins with real life: the beautiful parts, the painful parts, and the parts people are often afraid to say out loud.
Through writing, performance, recording, teaching, and community work, De'Ashia creates language for experiences that can be difficult to name, explain, or carry alone.
Poetry is not just about writing a good poem. It is about giving words to what hurts.
A life turned into language.
De'Ashia Wallace, known artistically as AJ P.R., is a poet, author, spoken-word performer, recording artist, community artist, and teaching artist who has been writing poetry since the age of fourteen.
Her work is rooted in lived experience. She writes about grief, family, childhood, relationships, violence, survival, identity, addiction, caregiving, memory, love, loss, and healing without asking those experiences to become neat or comfortable.
Her writing allows tenderness, anger, humor, regret, fear, resilience, and love to exist beside one another because that is often how they exist in real life.
The same honesty carries into her performances and recordings. On the page, the reader encounters the words. In spoken word, breath, silence, rhythm, cadence, and presence become part of the meaning.
Her creative work also reaches beyond performance. Through teaching and community programming, De'Ashia uses writing as a way to help people explore their own voices, experiences, identities, memories, and stories.
The voice behind the work.
AJ P.R. is not separate from De'Ashia Wallace. It is the artistic expression of the same person.
It is where the poet, spoken-word performer, recording artist, storyteller, and community voice meet.
Some work begins as something that needs to be written. Other work does not feel complete until it has been spoken aloud.
Music offers another way for that voice to move, while spoken word remains at the center of how AJ P.R. brings poetry into the room.
Even after everything life takes from you, your pen can still have ink.
More than one way to tell a story.
De'Ashia's creative life moves between writing, performance, recording, teaching, and community engagement.
Author & Poet
Personal, emotionally direct writing rooted in lived experience, family, grief, survival, identity, memory, and healing.
Spoken Word
Performance that brings rhythm, breath, silence, vulnerability, humor, tension, and physical presence into the writing.
Recording Artist
Spoken-word recordings, music, and developing audio work that allow the creative voice to live beyond the printed page.
Teaching Artist
Writing and creative-expression work designed to help others explore voice, memory, identity, and personal storytelling.
Community Artist
Creative work that belongs in schools, libraries, youth programs, nonprofits, cultural organizations, and community spaces, not only on a stage.
Founder
Through My Pen Still Has Ink LLC, De'Ashia is building a platform where writing, performance, recording, programming, and community can continue growing together.
The room matters as much as the stage.
De'Ashia's community background shapes how she approaches young people, organizations, and audiences.
Her experience includes youth and community programming in Ypsilanti, GEAR UP, Methodist Boys Home, libraries, author events, and other youth-centered spaces.
That experience influences how she thinks about programming. A school visit is not simply a smaller version of an adult performance. A youth workshop is not just a poem followed by an activity.
The audience, their age, their environment, what they are being asked to discuss, and what they need from the room all matter.
Community-Facing Experience
Some things need somewhere to go.
Writing gives difficult experiences somewhere to live without requiring them to become simple.
More than a name.
My Pen Still Has Ink LLC is the creative and community platform De'Ashia is building around her work.
It brings together her identity as an author, spoken-word artist, recording artist, teaching artist, community artist, and developing creative entrepreneur.
It gives the work somewhere to keep expanding: books, performances, recordings, workshops, youth programs, community campaigns, music, and future visual storytelling projects.
The idea is simple.
Life can take things from you. Grief can change you. Family can shape you. Survival can exhaust you.
But there can still be another poem, another page, another performance, another recording, another conversation, another way to create.
The pen still has ink.
The work is not finished.
The site reflects what De'Ashia is building now, but it is designed to grow as the creative work grows.
New publications, spoken-word recordings, music, interviews, performances, programs, collaborations, and future visual storytelling can all become part of the larger My Pen Still Has Ink body of work.
One artist. More than one form.
Poetry remains central. Spoken word gives it a voice. Music creates another lane. Teaching and community work create another kind of room.
Meet the work from another angle.
The Book
Explore The Hug I Wish I Gave You and the writing at the center of De'Ashia's published work.
Explore the Book →Hear AJ P.R.
Watch performance, hear spoken-word recordings, and explore De'Ashia's growing media work.
Media & Listen →Programs & Booking
Explore programming for schools, libraries, colleges, nonprofits, and community organizations.
Explore Programs →The writing begins with her story. The work becomes bigger when someone else recognizes their own.
Read the work. Hear the voice. Explore the programs. Bring AJ P.R. into the room.