Se’Anna Johnson Uses Art as a Tool for Healing and Change
Se’Anna Johnson, a South Minneapolis poet and emcee, began writing as a teenager to navigate mental health challenges. Today, she blends rhythm, poetry and sociology to support healing and community empowerment.
Se’Anna Johnson began writing poetry regularly around age 14 as a way to battle mental
health challenges she was facing. Writing was the only way she knew how to express herself.
Writing, Johnson said, allowed her to acknowledge and converse with the way she was
feeling about herself, life and God. Little did she know that years later she would be recording a full-length studio album.
At 21, Johnson was pulled onto the stage to perform some of her writing for the first time.
While attending one of her favorite events at Augsburg University, she was invited into a cypher.
“It was fight or flight,” she said. “I was like, ‘you know what? I know I can do this. They
don’t know I can do this but I know I can do this.’”
Her 16 bars were well received, she said, and from that moment she began performing more often.
The South Minneapolis native is a poet and emcee who uses conversational rap, “rhythm and poetry,” to speak more life, truth and light into the world.
Earlier this month, Johnson finished recording her first album. The project, titled “No Vacancy,” will be released March 23.
“[It] has been a really transformative experience for me,” Johnson said. “It’s been four years in the making and it’s really vulnerable and it’s really just a healing experience about learning what it means to be at home in your own mind, your own body and really just ridding of the things that no longer serve you, so you can make room for the things that do.”
Johnson is both a musician and a sociologist. She combines these callings through education and community work.
“I think my biggest thing is just figuring out ways to use storytelling to bring about
fellowship and just really amplifying art as a resolute restorative means for community,” she said.
From working with nonprofits, government agencies and schools, Johnson merges her
creativity and professional expertise to strengthen cultural responsiveness around communal needs.
Johnson founded Beyond Da Mic, a movement that teaches literacy by using what young
people already know: hip-hop songs and poetry. She has written rhymes with incarcerated youth as a behavior management and self-regulation tool, and facilitated workshops and vision-mapping sessions for Black women focused on mental health.
“I’m just out here trying to get as creative as possible about serving my community,” she
said.
Next, Johnson hopes to start a collective that creates more artistic opportunities and spaces across Minneapolis.
She has the ideas, she said, and is now planning, seeking funding and building visibility for
the arts and nontraditional education.
Her dreams extend even further. Johnson hopes to generate income she can reinvest into her community, and she would like to own commercial real estate “so we have more spaces that are run by us and are centered on us and can just help us care.”
“I would love to be a touring artist someday, full-time, letting my artistry make room for
me,” she said. “I would love more contract opportunities with the government, so that we make sure the voices of the people are still being incorporated in decision-making processes.”
What felt accidental during her time at Augsburg was, Johnson said, really God’s divine
timing.
Follow Se’Anna Johnson and her work at https://www.liveondamic.com/ .
Find her on all streaming platforms as “Se’Anna. on da Mic” and keep up with her on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/seanna.ondamic/?hl=en .
Damenica Ellis welcomes reader responses at dellis@spokesman-recorder.com.
Se’Anna Johnson podcast
On the Radar Podcast Episode 2 Features Poet and Emcee Se’Anna Johnson
South Minneapolis poet and emcee Se’Anna Johnson is featured on Episode 2 of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder’s On the Radar podcast.