Conscious Choice: Laura Peace Kelley

{Photo by Ritzy Ryciak}

When she isn’t teaching spoken-word poetry at one of Seattle’s many schools and community centers, you can find Laura Peace Kelley sifting through 1980s garb at Seattle’s avant-garde Red Light vintage clothing store or jamming on stage with her twelve-piece band, Marmalade, at Tost in Fremont. A Master teaching artist with Arts Corp, a local nonprofit organization dedicated to arts programs for youth (k-12), Laura recently wrote and recited a poem for the Dalai Lama during his five-day visit to Seattle. An underground rapper and poet, Miss Kelley is known for her “grassroots rap” — positive and enlightening lyrical content that has the capacity to heal and change the world.

August 2008 | People In Your Neighborhood

Laura Peace Kelley

Poet, Musician and Arts Activist

Village People
My community is with my musicians — being able to take music and poetry into community centers and share it.

Seattle Sparkle
My family has been here for almost 125 years and I still feel that history in Pioneer Square. My great grandmother owned a grocery store on 2nd Ave. in 1922. Pioneer Square was a hub for cultural diversity because of the port. We had Chinese immigrants and African Americans. It was diverse and hoppin’. People like Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald came to play music here. My grandmother, Ruby Bishop, was one of the jazz greats. She is 88 years old and she still jams.

Peace in the City
We have the most amazing underground poet coffeehouses here. The Bauhaus Books, Caffe Vita, Vivace, The Elliott Bay Book Co. and Faire Gallery Café. I wrote some of my most precious poems hunched behind a notepad in the smoky lofts of Seattle’s back-alley dark cafés.

On the Catwalk
Clothes are my crazy thing. Clothes find me. I have been collecting vintage for 15 years. My style is straight-up Value Village and Goodwill. Jazzy vintage — from the 1930s to now — pinstripes and spectator pumps. Some of my fave shopping spots are Red Light, Atlas Clothing Co. and Old Duffers Stuff in the Market.

Best Kept Secret
The air and the rain. It makes for this really lush oxygenated experience. I think people can breathe easy here. Yeah, it rains a lot — but the streets are clean. I am inspired by the rain — it is so calming to sleep at night.

Where to Kick It
I head to Belltown’s Rendezvous for some good old hip-hop. The Babalu in Wallingford, Baltic Room on Fridays, ToST and Queen Anne’s Paragon on Thursdays. I also gotta plug the Lo-Fi on Tuesdays for its crazy break beats and down tempo hip-hop.

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