[1][2][3][4][5][6] Humboldt State University notes West as a Renaissance man who has achieved success as a performer, activist, author, teacher, and poet.
[12] 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.
[14] 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.
He met then-Governor Bill Clinton and traveled to The United States Military Academy at West Point to compete.
[11] After a few years working as a college admissions officer at Duke, he moved to New York City to attend The New School for Social Research where he earned a Masters of Arts degree in liberal studies and philosophy in 1998, while immersing himself in the spoken word and poetry scene in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
[11][14] It was during this time that he started youth advocacy work and joined forces in early 2000 with Juba Kalamka, and Phillip Atiba Goff to form the black and queer hip-hop group Deep Dickollective (DDC).
[1] West believes the Bay Area, with San Francisco's AIDS activism, and Oakland's Black Panthers, was one of the few settings where DDC could emerge.
[11][19] The debut provided musical complement to his first book, Red Dirt Revival: a poetic memoir in 6 Breaths (2003).
[4][11][20][21] 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.
[14][22] 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.
[16][26] West continues to host "Front Porch,"[27] a spoken word/hip-hop/soul showcase that has appeared at various colleges and universities nationwide.
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.