Many would say my dreams shouldn’t be so big because I’m from a small city in Arkansas . Most people haven’t heard of it but I’m proud about the fact that I was born and raised in Pine Bluff , Arkansas . Contrary to popular belief, there are a lot of Black people in Arkansas which is evident in the fact that 96% of the people at my high school were African-Americans. Like many other Black kids, I was raised by my mother, no father present but I think the difference for me was that I didn’t really notice. I didn’t really notice that I was being raised without a father because my grandparents, aunts, cousins were always there for me. Hilary Clinton wrote a book titled It Takes A Village and I know that there was definitely a village that raised me and made me who I am today. Unfortunately, I do not always do as much for the village as I should but that same village taught me about community. Seeing as how I grew up with so many Black people, my community was definitely Black. Though I have a college degree and always made good grades, I would have to say that I learned the most from my community whether it was going to see Spike Lee’s Malcolm X with my family back in 1992 or having my grandmother serving as the best form of distribution for my poetry when I was teenager. Whether the lesson came from seeing drugs ruin some of the most influential Black men in my life to seeing the women in my life overcome the problems that drugs created in our community, I truly learned from what was going on around me even if I didn’t understand it at the time. I was thinking even when I was confused and many of the thoughts came out once I wrote a poem for the first time when I was 14. The name of my first poem was called Teenager, Not Danger and I basically got some of the anger out that was deep within me at the time without me even knowing it. From there I began writing almost everyday. Writing a poem, just for the sake of writing, is a luxury to me. I know it’s God’s gift and I’m suppose to use it on a much higher level but I’d write even if nobody ever read my work because it’s what I love to do. I’ll never stop writing which is basically where the 2 Pens & Lint comes from. When I first started writing, a poem would pop into my head at any moment so I’d instantly reach for a pen out of my pocket. One day, the one pen I had ran out of ink and I didn’t get to write because I didn’t have another pen around. From then on, I began to carry two ink pens in my pocket so that I would always be able to write when an idea, line, or poem came to my head. Because my mother wasn’t rich and I didn’t have much money in my pockets, the only contents of my pocket were usually two pens and lint. -Christopher K. P. Brown (July 2007)