For Tacovia Braggs, DaVerse Lounge Is Essential to Life

By Mario Tarradell, Public Relations & Marketing Manager

Tacovia Braggs was a junior at David W. Carter High School. She was 16. The perennial wallflower, she buried her head in her poetry. So her spoken word teacher, Darius Frasure, invited her to attend DaVerse Lounge. It was 2005.

Tacovia, now a busy, 28-year-old flight attendant, remains as connected to DaVerse Lounge as that fateful first time she got up onstage and read the provocative, no-minced-words piece, “Just To Make You Think.” In fact, head over to any DaVerse Lounge event this 12th season – don’t miss it Friday, December 9, 2016 at Life in Deep Ellum – and you’ll see Tacovia working the platform right alongside DaVerse Lounge creator and emcee Will Richey.

“You can’t describe DaVerse, you can only experience it,” she says by phone from the Indianapolis airport. “As an adult you will never find a place like DaVerse, so as a kid it’s, well, DaVerse. It is what it is. DaVerse should be in every city, in every corner of the world, because everybody should have that opportunity.”

For Tacovia, DaVerse arrived in the nick of time. She spent much of her adolescence trapped in her own emotions. You see, Tacovia’s home life was less than stellar. At the tender age of 2, her father was murdered. That’s when her mother closed off the rest of the world, including Tacovia. So the little girl born and raised in Dallas slowly grew more and more insular. She turned to her writing for refuge.

“My solution to the problem was to bottle it up and say nothing,” she says. “That was the only way I knew how to handle life. Because showing emotions was either laughed at or frowned upon. I’m a writer because of it; that was my way of talking without talking.”

So at DaVerse, Tacovia not only read her original poetry before an audience at every event, but she also found a safe haven for her fragile soul. Her DaVerse debut was indeed nerve-wracking, and Tacovia admits that she hid behind the paper where her poem was written. It became her shield. But there was already something magical at work. She felt a kinship with total strangers.

“You walk into that room and there are all these people everywhere, and yet you felt like you belonged somewhere,” she says. “You didn’t feel like they were turning around watching you when you walked through the door. Nobody judged you. I didn’t feel anybody was watching me. Kids were nice, the adults were nice. They were all welcoming. I felt so excited about being around these kids. I wasn’t really social even when I was a kid. I wasn’t a social butterfly talking to children. But being in there it was like, oh, they are kind of like me.”

Tacovia immediately connected with Richey and with DaVerse Lounge mentor and bandleader Alejandro Perez, Jr. She would be invited back again and again until attending DaVerse was a life essential like food and water.

“That first poem was full of so much conviction, power and strength that we invited her to become a part of our traveling poetry group in the Metroplex,” says Richey. “DaVerse Lounge gave her a home to nourish and activate the power of her voice, and in turn we learned from her. What started as a mentor-mentee relationship has evolved into a lifelong friendship, even a sense of family. My wife and children consider her a part of our extended family.”

Through the trials and tribulations of the teenage years, and then the college years, and then the getting ready for the real world years, DaVerse Lounge was there. It became Tacovia’s refuge, her character-building sanctuary.

“I knew that my situation when I was growing up wasn’t the best of circumstances, but when I got to DaVerse I never had to think about it,” she says. “I didn’t have to think about homework or test scores or my house or my family situation. I was not thinking about all the things that bothered me because I was overwhelmed with all the joy that was around me.”

And then something extraordinary happened, something completely unexpected. Tacovia’s mother was driving her to the events, and she would stay for the entire show. Slowly but surely the lines of communication between Tacovia and her mother began to open. Two people who were virtual strangers after tragedy struck suddenly started to talk.

“Before DaVerse we didn’t have conversations, period,” she says, “so it definitely opened everything for us. When I came to DaVerse you were able to talk about it, express it. It made me more confident because I was learning how to accept and process life.”

Today Tacovia is based in Houston and has been a flight attendant for United Airlines since 2011. She’s a North American flight attendant, which includes travel to Canada and Mexico. “That’s about as international as I get,” she jokes.

She’ll tell you without any qualms that she talks up DaVerse Lounge on the planes. DaVerse Lounge is her rite of passage, the missing link that gave her the courage to face her emotions, to socialize with strangers, to revel in an ambiance that is completely judgment-free. DaVerse Lounge turned this wallflower into the belle of the ball.

“What Big Thought invested in is a goldmine because kids are always being told what to do,” she says. “They are at home and being told what to do. They go to school and they are being told what to do, how to react, what choices to make. There is this constant control. As adults we go from obligation to obligation to obligation. But kids go through this in a heightened state because they are growing. Being in DaVerse, even if you aren’t reading, gives them a place to be, to just breathe, and not be bogged down with concerns. You don’t need to worry about anything when you go there. You don’t have that burden of trying to figure out what am I supposed to be doing. You’re not getting fussed at or criticized or chastised. You are there to be a part of something greater than you. DaVerse is what life should be like.”

Richey sees Tacovia as a shining portrait of the power of DaVerse Lounge. He found in Tacovia a fellow poet, a dear friend, and a kindred heart-on-the-sleeve spirit.

“It is an honor to have her back at every show to provide that nurturing and yet firm example of a young female voice who has become a thriving professional,” he says. “It takes a village to raise a child, but it also takes a village to support an adult. Tacovia embodies that.”

DaVerse Lounge, a partnership between Big Thought and Journeyman Ink, thanks TACA, Dallas Mavericks, and State Farm for their generous support.

Photos courtesy of Tacovia Braggs and Can Turkyilmaz @turk_studio