Tim'm T. West

Timothy Terrell West (born July 6, 1972), better known as Tim'm T. West, is an American educator and multi-discipline performance artist, author, hip hop recording artist, poet, activist, and youth advocate. Humboldt State University notes West as a Renaissance man who has achieved success as a performer, activist, author, teacher, and poet. He has been featured in many documentaries about hip hop culture, in addition to his books, he is widely anthologized, and has produced nine hip hop albums including with Deep Dickollective.

Early life and education West was born with a speech impediment that caused him to stutter and repeat the 'M' on his first name. He is the second son of nine children, born into a musical family in Cincinnati, Ohio to Charles Edward, a minister, and his mother, Irma Pearl Stinson, who served at various times as an administrative assistant and nurse. He counts his mother as one of the biggest influences on his life, showing him how to be thankful, loving, forgiving, and gracious. He says his dad was more of a storefront preacher with mixed success, but it did offer the first times West recalls being a poet, and performing.

His activity as a Boy Scout led him to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) which sponsored his troop. He began attending LDS Church functions at the age of twelve. While being considered for a Mormon mission, he came out to his Bishop, which heightened his existing feelings of rejection and shame. This was a difficult for him, and he contemplated his future, as well as suicide. He struggled with depression and anxiety. He decided to move on to attend college, accept himself, even if uncertain about what his future held. His tireless work as a high school student enabled many opportunities for college, Cornell University and Duke University among others.

West enrolled at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, and used an opportunity while at Duke, to attend Howard University in his senior year to experience and study at a historical black college. He returned to complete his studies at Duke, and graduated in 1994, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy, with a concentration in women's studies and pre-law. West coined the term homohop but feels that the term should be replaced. At first it helped organize LGBTQI hip hop artists, but he feels now it serves to separate artists who are fundamentally just hip hop artists. The debut provided musical complement to his first book, Red Dirt Revival: a poetic memoir in 6 Breaths (2003). West says the book and CD are testimonial, they are "literary and musical projections of my rites of passage from shame and silence into self-love." In the Fall of 2008, and in support of the campaign against California's Proposition 8, West created a limited edition chapbook Love In Full Color. In January 2009, he released a third solo rap project, In Security: The Golden Error. In July 2011 he released Fly Brotha, which also received critical acclaim. His fifth solo release, Snapshots: The He-Art and Experience of Tim'm T. West, was released in April 2013.

West continues to host "Front Porch," a spoken word/hip-hop/soul showcase that has appeared at various colleges and universities nationwide. He has been recognized for his work over multiple years with the National Association of People with AIDS's "Positive Youth Institute," and his graduation as a distinguished fellow of the Black AIDS Institute's "African-American HIV University's Community Mobilization College."

West served as the Department Chair of English and Creative Writing at the Oakland School of the Arts from 2002 to 2004 before relocating to Washington, DC where he taught in the English Department of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter High School. In various capacities, since 1995, West has also worked for College Summit, notably as a high school coordinator in DC in 2006 and 2007, where he helped to the build capacity of high schools to get more of their students into college. He is known for his engaging teaching methods, and has taught on the post-secondary level as an instructor of Writing Pedagogy classes at Eugene Lang College of The New School in New York City, and as an instructor in Stanford University's first-year Writing and Critical Thinking Program. In the 2008 to 2009 Academic Year, West taught in the Department of World Languages and Cultures as a Visiting Lecturer in Ethnic Studies at California's Humboldt State University. More recently, West served as an adjunct professor of English and Philosophy at Houston Community College, and in the summer of 2011, joined distinguished faculty with the Washington National Cathedral Scholars Program where he taught a 6-week blog-based social justice/activism course.

In May 2011, West relocated to Chicago, Illinois, where his daughter, Shannon Rose Matesky, a recent DePaul University graduate and well known poet, spoken word artist and performer, lives. He started MyWritingProfessor.com where he serves as the owner and principal consultant, and remains a longstanding advocate for youth. Tim'm's desire to have a broader impact on LGBTQ youth and young adults led his interest in Teach For America, who'd just launched its LGBTQ Initiative and was seeking a managing director. Given the trajectory of his own struggles as a queer black male in the South and even a suicide attempt at sixteen, Tim'm proudly accepted this position with Teach For America in July 2014; a position he feels bridges his work as an educator with his long-standing commitment to LGBTQ youth advocacy. He relocated from Washington, DC to Atlanta, GA where he serves on the Atlanta-based Programming Board for the LGBT Institute. Tim'm was promoted to Senior Managing Director of Teach For America's LGBTQ Community Initiative and continues to do work nationally to advance safer and braver classrooms for LGBTQ kids and educators.