Kavon Cortez-Jones: Poet of the People, Proud in Purple

Meet KJ. Kavon “KJ” Cortez-Jones is a Milwaukee poet whose gregarious presence draws audiences into his waterfalls of words. He celebrated his 28th birthday in 2022.

“I try my best to be an ambassador of the city. I wish folks saw Milwaukee in the way that I see it,” KJ says. “I feel I lived through certain different angles of Milwaukee, through the traumatic inner city and then diving into the community.”

In his 2016 collection of poetry, self-published as the book Club Noir, KJ called Milwaukee the “Paris of the Midwest.” In his written and spoken words there is an evident love of the city, its people, its quirks, its rhythms. There is also an uncalculating intimacy that swings on lattices of playful syllables from youthful nostalgia through emotional internality to careful observation of urban life. Overall, readers—and especially live audiences—are struck by the expansiveness of KJ’s sonic portraits, washed by waves of his rolling words.

“Why not focus on the light of Milwaukee has?” KJ says.

His poetry leads with an untarnished optimism that affirmatively builds upon itself.

From “Love Letter to Milwaukee”:

…My mother came from Whiteville, Tennessee, a runaway teenager.
I ran away from her mental abuse with a backpack full of comp books and dreams.
I didn’t want her to redline my aspirations.

Germans came and fell in love with Lake Michigan,
built Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, Miller Breweries.
They call you the city that made beer famous.
No wonder why we are so drunk.…

KJ’s poetry doesn’t so much shine a light on dark topics—it’s more that the pure energy of his sharing provides evidence of the “light of Milwaukee” itself. The effect is often a sort of cathartic connection between poet and audience.

“I’m a very sweet, warm, approachable person,” KJ reflects. “I think because I grew up around such a toxic environment I didn’t want to be that way.”

KJ describes himself on a journey of self-discovery, learning who he is and what he likes. The pandemic punctuated his twenties, but he’s learned some things. He loves immersing his mind in the liberty of language, surrounding himself with positive people, and clothing his body in the color purple.

It is his favorite color. The color is an important symbol, he says, and one he wears with pride. In part homage to his creative hero Prince (purple rain slants across the cover of Club Noir), in purple KJ finds a fusion and fluidity of identity that appeals: if purple were a person, he muses, it wouldn’t be a man or a woman but integrate both qualities. A royal color, in its synthesis of red’s heat and blue’s cold KJ finds purple a color of healing and union.

You might see KJ biking to get around town, a hummingbird hopping between coffee shops and bookstores. He estimates he bikes some 30 miles a day. “If you don’t see me on my bike, I’m somewhere in a coffee shop talking to someone,” KJ says. “I’ve learned that [to connect] you don’t always have to pass the business card.”

Musing that he probably has 500 favorite people, for his next book KJ contemplates capturing a hundred memories featuring a hundred of his favorite Milwaukeeans. Shortly before his 28th birthday celebration in 2022, he was already planning for his 30th birthday party to feature this book release. “Two years is enough,” he says.

People he would like to meet include astrophysicist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson (“He’s [also] a Libra!”) and (re-meet) poet Sarah Kay. (“She’s a Japanese Jewish woman from Manhattan, New York. I met her in Philadelphia and I met her in Chicago,” KJ says.) In 2022 KJ also confides a sincere desire for developing a relationship with a single special someone.

KJ credits Emilio De Torre and Molly Collins, formerly of the Milwaukee office of the ACLU, as important adult mentors who supported him and opened his eyes to Milwaukee’s larger story. As a teenager, KJ remembers biking down to the ACLU offices in the Third Ward to find support he was not finding at home. “I didn’t know Milwaukee had so much going on until I met him [Emilio De Torre] and I started to see the positive part of how folks are so willing and able to organize and to put together things.”

As WaterMarks’ first artist whose main medium is words, when considering how he might integrate water into his public art proposal, KJ thinks deep. “I’ll probably just write about the origin of water and where it exists besides on this planet. I’ve heard Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about some moons [orbiting Jupiter and Saturn with water]. That’s really cool. Where there’s water, there’s life. Yeah, I’ll probably get cosmic.”