Marcel Fable Price is a lot of things. The Kalamazoo native returned to his hometown in 2024 from Grand Rapids, where he had undeniably made waves in that city’s creative and nonprofit circles.
His resume glitters with accolades from his time there: recipient of a Community Advocate Award, 40 Under 40 honoree, poet laureate of Grand Rapids for three years, Black Bottom Community Builder award winner, Michigan Humanities Impact Partner of the Year, 2022 Newsmaker of the Year, and the Imagination Award from the West Michigan Center for Arts and Technology.
But accolades don’t capture all that the 36-year-old Price is or has done. He’s a published poet and spoken-word artist who has just released his new book, New American Monarch, and he works as director of community and strategic engagement for Kalamazoo Forward Ventures (KzFV), a $50 million, Black-founded investment firm based in Kalamazoo. He is the founder and former executive director of The Diatribe, a Grand Rapids nonprofit that connects art and activism; a self-taught creative; a widower; and a man who manages his bipolar disorder and three very loud but lovable dogs. But ask him what his greatest triumph has been and it’s none of these.
“My greatest triumph is I’m here,” he says. “When my wife was dying, I became so mentally unwell. I was just trying to do too much. I’m running a multi-million-dollar organization (The Diatribe) with only three full-time people. I’m not only raising the money, I’m helping with programming, I’m doing all the things. I ground myself into dust. My tenure ended with The Diatribe, and I lost the person I love. To lose all of it, I didn’t wanna live. I think my triumph is making it out of that, making it to the other side of that, and wanting to be here.”
How did you get where you are today?
I moved to Grand Rapids (from Kalamazoo) in 2014 and was looking for a sense of community. I started performing at a weekly event at the Hookah Lounge and was absolutely enamored by the energy. I ran into this community of artists — hip-hop artists, poets, singer-songwriters — and we decided to enter Art Prize, a huge art competition in Grand Rapids. We called ourselves The Diatribe and created the first-ever blind- and deaf-friendly Art Prize exhibit.
There were a ton of teachers that came with busloads of young people, and they’d ask if we ever thought about teaching young people and we were like, “Absolutely not” (he laughs).
We were absolute ruffians and not fit to be role models for young people. There was one teacher who taught at an alternative school who brought us in for a Career Day, which we shouldn’t have been doing ’cause we were not making money doing art in West Michigan.
But we talked about the things that you can do. I started talking about what it was to be a young Black kid with bipolar, depression and anxiety and growing up in an abusive household, because that’s what a lot of my poems are about, you know, my upbringing, my life.
A couple weeks later we got a manila envelope full of letters from the young people, telling us about what they felt, and they wanted us to come back. And we did every single week for the entire school year. What we didn’t know was teachers talk, and before we knew it we were in six, seven schools a week.
It was suggested we turn this into a nonprofit. And in 2016 I decided to put my hat in the ring to become Grand Rapids’ poet laureate. I thought if I could become poet laureate, if I could become the youngest in city history, the first person of color, the first person without a college degree, that maybe I could leverage that with starting a nonprofit and turn this into something big.
Fast-forward a couple years. I’ve been dating an incredible woman who is diagnosed with cancer. Fast-forward two more years. It’s 2021 and the pandemic is in bloom. Arts organizations are flipped on their heads. But somehow we quadrupled in size. Me and my wife get married. We think we beat cancer. A year later the cancer comes back more aggressive. I pour myself into work when I’m not caregiving and decide to raise $6 million to create a multicultural art center in my neighborhood and raised $6.5 million. Staff is burnt out. Staff is exhausted. They were not happy with how things grew. They weren’t happy with me as a leader. My wife dies, and it becomes the best thing for me to leave the organization. I felt lost. And there was something in my heart that was saying, “Move back to Kalamazoo. Move back to Kalamazoo.”
Describe the unique features of your new book, New American Monarch.
When I met with Ander Monson, the editor of Diagram/New Michigan Press, he gave me creative control to make this book everything that I wanted it to be. The inside of this book has doodles that I drew so that it feels like the author’s copy. It feels personal. The pages are made to look distressed. Every poem has a QR code that brings you to (that poem in) an audio version of the book. This book is for the people who like to be read to and the people who like to read. It’s also unique in (terms of) the incredibly talented, diverse artists, from the photographer to illustrators to the person who made the QR codes, who came into it to bring it to life.
What’s next?
I’m working on a book of nonfiction and getting back to doing shows again. My shows are really rooted in storytelling — the good, the bad and the ugly of everything of human existence and of my story. What I try to do is talk about the ugly so much that it makes people feel comfortable enough to talk about the ugly, you know, talk about the shame, the guilt, the discomfort.
— Interview by Marie Lee, edited for length and clarity.
This story is part of the Southwest Michigan Journalism Collaborative’s coverage of equitable community development. SWMJC is a group of 12 regional organizations dedicated to strengthening local journalism. To learn more, visit swmichjournalism.com.
