PEORIA MAGAZINE August 2023

W O R D C O U N T

‘A RAPPER’S APPROACH’ Peoria author De’Marcus Hamilton helps students chase their post-classroom dreams with a literary mixtape

BY LAURIE PILLMAN PHOTO BY RON JOHNSON

A s high school seniors start their final year, some are making decisions about careers while others are fo cused on college. Peoria native De’Mar cus Hamilton, under the pen name Marc Supreme, wants students to go into post-secondary education with a better plan than he did. In his book, D@mn, I Graduate in May!: A Literary Mixtape for Life After High School and College , he tries to dispel the belief that college alone will bring success and to show students how to leverage their educations to achieve their dreams. When Hamilton graduated from Peoria High School, he had a poor cu mulative grade point average. He says he wasn't focused his first two years, but with his mom's help, he improved his outlook and got a diploma. He was hungry for success, so the now 36-year-old got his bachelor's degree in journalism and his master's degree in public affairs, thinking it was the path to becoming an anchor on CNN or a host of 106 & Park on the BET Network. Two years later, he was homeless and cleaning toilets at a gym in Atlanta, wondering what he'd done wrong. "I did the things that I thought were the right way to get me to where I

wanted to go,” he said, “and it still didn't equal where I wanted to go." A REVELATION The epiphany came when he got a job recruiting for Southern Illinois Univer sity Carbondale and later at Northern Illinois University. As he listened to students talk about what they wanted to do in college, he realized that he'd approached his education wrong. College alone doesn't bring success, he concluded. Education must be lever aged with experience and connections to make dreams happen. He wrote D @ mn, I Graduate in May! — DIGIM for short — to help students circumvent some of the troubles he encountered. "I took a rapper's approach. That's why it's a literary mixtape because rappers drop mixtapes. It's not a whole bunch of jargon. It's not over your head. It's not all these work-cited pages and all that garbage,” Hamilton said. “It was just about look, here's my experience, for what it's worth. It may apply. It may not. But this is sound information on how you want to approach dream chasing." Big-name publishers loved the concept but told Hamilton they needed 300 pages to make it work. He didn't want to write something that had been done before. He wanted to do something different

that would seem cool, easy, fun and interesting to the people who needed the information. Rather than cave to the publishers, he self-published. The decision made a major difference. Hamilton/Supreme's book is ap proachable for a generation used to getting information quickly. At under 100 pages — some chapters are as short as two — the book reads like a social media post. Emojis are scattered throughout the text. The table of con tents is set up like an album tracklist. The whole book is easily digestible in a short sitting, with essential concepts standing out on bold black pages. DRAKE VS. MIGOS MAJORS One key concept Hamilton/Su preme shares is understanding the difference between "Drake" and "Migos" majors. "You got two different types of majors," he said. "You got Drake majors, and you got Migos majors. If you want to be successful in any career, you need three things. Fundamentally you need education, you need a network, and you need experience. Drake is a rapper, singer and producer who has all those things built in. Migos is a trio of rappers where each is legit in their own right, but it takes the three of them [Quavo,

74 JULY 2023 PEORIA MAGAZINE