Untytled: The Val Town Interview
The Val Town Interview — Volume 01.
This interview was released in February 2023.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about your upbringing and how that influenced your career as a historian of black culture?
I was born in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York and raised in Delaware. I grew up in a Christian, West Indian household with both my parents being from the islands. My mother is from the Island of Haiti while my father is from the Island of Dominica.
Throughout my childhood, I realized I had a knack for storytelling, and my mother even said I started reading at two years old.
At what moment did you know you were on the right track with the intricate cultural threads you presented on social media?
In high school, my English teacher asked me wanted I wanted to do after I graduated. I told her I didn’t know but she told me I was a great storyteller and I had to utilize this gift. She also gave me information about screenwriting which is how I learned how to explore certain elements within storytelling. I would use my imagination to translate things that were in my head and flush them out on paper. Also, I knew I wanted to be known for storytelling, so I started to consider creating a platform for myself.
During my second year of college in 2017, I wanted to tell gangster and street stories because I grew up in this environment. My parents did a great job of shielding me from certain things, but I still grew up around a lot of street guys which persuaded me to write about it. I had friends that came from impoverished households, were in jail, or passed away prematurely so I started to do a lot of background research on why these things occurred. My curiosity toward these issues were heightened after a good friend of mine was killed during my senior year in high school.
My knack for storytelling combined with the answers I wanted for myself regarding these community issues is what led me to tell the stories people read today.
In your threads, you cover a wide range of historical moments in black culture including the rise of the Black Panther movement, the lives of powerful drug kingpins, and more. How do you pick and choose what subjects to cover in your threads?
While on Twitter one day, I saw a tweet about Ronald Reagan, and it talked about the Immigrant Reform and Control Act of 1986. I was empowered to talk about this because my parents were immigrants, and they came over here during the Reagan era. I responded to the tweet with my own critique which ended up receiving a ton of traction. From there, I took the tweet and created an entire thread out of it. At the time, Twitter didn’t have a thread feature, so I had to connect a ton of tweets under my original one and expand on key components such as Freeway Ricky Ross, crack laws, Hip Hop, etc. Once this thread blew up, I knew this was a lane that I could create for myself. I also ended up doing social media work for Def Jam because of my threads.
I’m a huge movie and documentary thread so I want each thread to feel like a short movie. Some of my most popular social media threads include The Supreme Team, The Black Panther Party, Michael Jackson, and BMF (Black Mafia Family) to name a few. With each thread, I gather photos and attempt to capture the essence of specific time periods by providing information that people can gravitate to.
What’s next for you?
I’m looking forward to either writing a film or a book based on my shared experience with life and through the social media threads I’ve created.
