There are moments in a life that split us open — not to break us, but to reveal the blueprint we’ve been carrying all along. In this conversation with writer and truth-teller Steven Underwood, we meet those moments one by one: a grandmother’s quiet rebellion, the glow of a first computer, a kiss that rearranges identity, and the digital worlds that become refuge when the physical ones fail.
Steven’s creative lineage begins with Grandma Candy Cane, a Harlem Renaissance-era dreamer who walked with a cane after a near-fatal fall and still insisted on managing artists, championing Black music, and protecting her daughter’s right to rap — even when their faith community disapproved. “Art was always at my fingertips,” Steven recalls, tracing his voice back to hers.
If his grandmother gave him language, his grandfather gave him access. An engineer who helped design one of the first ATMs, he placed a computer in the house before most families could imagine needing one. What Steven didn’t know then was that these early portals — poetry and processors — would fuse into the foundation of his life’s work: documenting the New Black Digital Arts Renaissance.
But the path to that clarity was anything but straight. Steven speaks openly about the racialized accusation that led to his arrest in college — all over a misinterpreted tweet — and the PTSD that followed. It was a rupture that forced him to confront a world quick to criminalize Black expression. And yet, even in that dark moment, strangers in the holding cell showed him unexpected compassion. “They were insulted for me,” he remembers.
Healing, he explains, often comes through naming what was never allowed to be spoken. That’s why Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange — and the grief of a first same-gender kiss he once denied — appears in his book. Vulnerability is not decoration; it is the engine of truth.
As Steven writes, “Art without vulnerability is just product.”
Steven’s upcoming book, Forever for the Culture, is a love letter to Black digital creators whose imaginations remake the internet daily. But it is also an invitation: to honor our stories before they vanish, to build worlds spacious enough for our contradictions, and to believe that softness — especially Black softness — is a form of survival.
