The University of Arizona Press
January 13, 2026
Today we share a poetry playlist by Danielle P. Williams, author of Chamorrita Song, featuring five tracks that illuminate the poet’s creative process.
For poet and spoken-word artist Danielle P. Williams, Kantan Chamorrita is more than just the ancient craft of Chamorro folk song. It is also a return and a homecoming. This impromptu style of communal call-and response performance art forms the spokes for Williams’s debut collection. Rooted in oral tradition, Chamorrita Song pays homage to Black and Chamorro cultures, honoring the artistic expressions that these communities have created to reconcile lifetimes of imposed trauma. Bearing witness to these many narratives, Williams intertwines spoken word poetry and gospel music with Chamorro storytelling, weaving together the nuanced histories of queer, Black, and Indigenous existence and literature.
Read (and listen along with) Williams’ playlist below:
Track #1: “Just Like Water” by Lauryn Hill
I’ve always longed for the water. The anointing of ancestral acceptance. Felt a sense of godliness in the power the ocean carries. The kind of power music carries. This is a song that brings it all to life for me. It envelops me in a trance of willingness and vulnerability. Bathing me “in a fountain of his essence,” I’ve always felt so humbled by Lauryn Hill’s honesty, in her ability to say what is needed in this way. Giving in to the water. Giving in to the fear of misunderstanding and allowing the movement of chords to compel a story that is so familiar. A Black woman yearning for understanding. A musician turning to what they know best to relate to a world that was never really built for them. Like she says before the song even starts, this is what happens after rebellion. A choice to be softer. A choice to seek the kind of knowledge that brings you to the version of yourself you’ve only really ever dreamt about until now.
That is what Chamorrita Song is. A return to the self after what felt like a lifetime of defiance. A song I shaped from a world of pain. Water washing over me. Cleansing me of what the world insisted wasn’t possible for someone like me. The arpeggiated chords have always transported me, guiding me to write some of the most difficult poems I’ll ever write. In a way, I’ve taken that yearning, that hunger for more, and allowed myself to fully embody my emotions on the page. And sometimes when it feels too hard, I play this song.
Track #2: Cover of Brandy’s “Necessary” by Ahja Wells
This cover of Brandy’s “Necessary,” sung by Ahja Wells of The Walls Group, flips the original into a gospel offering—bridging that longing for personal triumph with purposeful praise. It takes a familiar, already intimate song and reframes it in a new light, mirroring how so many poems in Chamorrita Song are pleading to be understood in a multitude of ways. How one message can hold such duality. How a single phrase can open into whole worlds of thought. What I love about this version is its fearlessness—its willingness to take what existed before and transform it into an experience that carries a different idea of love and understanding.
This speaks true for so many poems in this collection that honor writers and people in my life who have helped me interpret the world. It pays homage while also expanding outward, gathering all those ideologies and shaping them into one feeling. And toward the end, Ahja flips the song again, blending in “Until the End of Time” by Justin Timberlake, weaving three ways to express the same truth: how necessary it is to love and be loved. What it means to belong to this world in a bigger way than we sometimes allow ourselves to imagine.
Track #3: “Symptom of Life” by Willow
This song holds the angst of the human condition. The choice to take what haunts you and make something beautiful. For me, it manifests as the hard truth of what Black, Indigenous, and queer communities have endured—and continue to endure. A reminder that no matter what has happened to you, you must decide how it will continue to live inside you. Pain is inevitable. Emerging from it is not. How will you choose another route through?
There’s something in the way Willow admits to “pushing and peeling myself out of disguise,” something in the way they keep “pushing and peeling the layers that cover my mind,” that feels like a blueprint for survival. A constant unmasking. A shedding. A turning toward the rawest parts of the self.
Chamorrita Song’s translations and adaptations speak directly to this. A calling back to ancestral ways of endurance, alongside my own depression and anxiety repeating those same patterns. It helps me look back at how those before me carved out paths from their pain through a creative outlet that felt inherently theirs whether poetry, dance, weaving, carving, song, or whatever form of expression that happened to take hold of them. Because what is art if not a symptom of life?
Track #4: “At My Own Risk” by Danielle P. Williams featuring Jonzie Bonez and Toyya Lynai
This song, for me, perfectly encapsulates my rage at this time in my life. The breaking point that lets me reclaim my voice in an unapologetic way, setting the scene for a new version of myself and how I used my art to speak my truth. It’s about the risk of choosing yourself and the possibility of long-term reward. In its own way, it feels like its own version of a Chamorrita Song. Gritty, honest, unconcerned with how anyone else sees me. I remember writing it in about ten minutes, how every poem around that time just poured out of me. A release of pent-up frustration that set the tone for the rest of the music that followed. It felt so good to return to the musician in me after drifting from that version of myself. Poetry and music have always driven me, even when I was young. And whenever I return to the songs I’ve made, I know I’ve reached a new understanding of myself—one ready to accept whatever comes next and reap the rewards of continuing to come into myself as a poet and a person.
Track #5: “All I Do” by Robert Glasper featuring SiR, Bridget Kelly, and Song Bird
This song feels like longing. A slow haunting of personal will. A plea to be seen and heard. It begins with poetry and expands into a stunning collaboration that calls for more. In some ways it reminds me of my “why” for writing this collection. How a piece of me exists in every poem I write, especially the ones that reach toward those before me and those after. When I applied to MFA programs, one of the poems in my packet was an early version of Tano’ I Man Chamorro, the words on our crest meaning “Land of the CHamorus.” Even then, before diving into translation and poetry during my years at George Mason, I knew one thing: I needed to understand more deeply. And if there was anything I could do, I would do it—to understand better, to write better, to be better. This song has played hundreds of thousands of times over the years, looping and urging me to keep pouring myself onto the page, even when I felt like I was doing it wrong. I knew Chamorrita Song was something I had to write, even before I could name what it was becoming. That feeling pushed me to soak in everything—traveling back home to the Marianas, immersing myself in stories and histories, and questioning what it means to live my experience in a way only I can. Sometimes it feels strange to claim the term “Chamorrita Song” as my own, because I am still early in my journey of understanding my culture and myself. There is so much I will get wrong, and so much I probably already have. But over the years, I’ve learned it’s not about doing something “right” or “wrong.” It’s about fully surrendering to the process of belonging. And if that’s all I do, I’m grateful I did.
Danielle P. Williams is a Black and Chamorro poet, translator, essayist, and spoken-word artist from Columbia, South Carolina. She received her BA in Arts administration from Elon University in 2016 and MFA in poetry from George Mason University in 2021. Her chapbook, Who All Gon’ Be There?, was a finalist for the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest and selected from the Backbone Press 3rd Annual Chapbook Competition for publication in fall 2021. She currently lives in Los Angeles, where she works as a copywriter and creative strategist.
