"Dementia" is a riveting piece that interrogates the political utility of cultural memory within hip-hop. I AM Tasha Jones blurs the lines between the public and private, the personal and political to offer a searing critique of what happens when hip-hop forgets where "home" is."* - Demetrius Noble

Dementia a poem written and performed by Poet, I AM Tasha Jones, inculcates the theory that Hip Hop has forgotten who it is and its purpose for being present, regardless of sexual preference. She contends the root is severed. Hip-Hop now suffers from a lack of respect for itself and women in general. Listen as this homage marks a generation longing for a 'return to self' and balance in the genre that fed, nourished, and raised a nation of millions.

*- Demetrius Noble is an activist, renowned poet, a recent graduate from North Carolina A&T State University and A Wadaran L. Kennedy Scholar (4.0)

"For all who believe we're living in a post-racial society, Tasha Jones' “Pyramids to Plantations to Projects to Penitentiaries” offers a bracing corrective. African-Americans descended from the great builders of the pyramids came largely to this country as slaves to work the plantations of our nation's founders. Ms. Jones reminds us that despite the noble rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, the freedom promised in those documents was not available to all, and a system of racial oppression has been in place ever since—through Jim Crow, racial covenants, and housing discrimination, profiling and police violence, and the entire prison industrial complex. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has observed, "Until we accept our collective biography and its consequences,”​ we cannot be fully free. Tasha's poem challenges us to live in the truth."

- Karen Kovacik, Professor of English at IUPUI, former Poet Laureate of Indiana

I first heard Tasha Jones’ poem “From Pyramids to Plantations to Projects to Penitentiaries” when she performed it at a “Resist” Poetry Reading after the recent election. Twenty-five people read poems, but I don’t remember a single one of the others. I could not forget Tasha’s. I don’t know of any other poem that projects an accurate arc of history. The very title of the poem sums up the history of black people in the United States, from their distinguished origins elsewhere to the unspeakable tragedy of slavery and the unrelenting persecution of their race through a series of ingenious forms of legal and social diminishment...
Tasha Jones not only gives us the arc of this shocking history, she personalizes it in images and phrases that are as vivid as they are valid...
Follow Tasha Jones’ poem to a deeper understanding of injustice and endurance, of suffering and survival. Pray that we who call ourselves “white” may not forever be blind, that words like these may teach us to see. - Dan Wakefield an American novelist, journalist and screenwriter. Author of Best-selling novels Going All The Way and Starting Over.

I enjoyed yesterday’s story very much. It inspired me to tell you about an incredible woman in Indianapolis. Her name is Tasha Jones. She is a poet, artist, educator, and founder of the Hello Beautiful movement. Hello Beautiful started in Ms. Jones’ public school classroom where she was the 14th teacher the class had in ONE school year. All of their other teachers gave up on them, but not Tasha Jones. On the first day, Tasha Jones heard the students discussing who was the blackest. This startled her so much that she had them write down all the bad things they had heard about themselves on one side of the paper. On the other side, she had them write the good things. Then, Ms. Jones, had the students write what they wanted to become. From that day forward the students greeted each other with “Hello Beautiful” and addressed each other as though they were already what they wanted to become. “Hello Beautiful, how is attorney Darnell Jackson today?” “What was your question, Dr. Shanequa Smith?” This simple act of language changed the dynamic of the entire classroom, and EVERY student passed to the next grade. ​ - Kitchen Sisters, NPR