Grammy-nominated artist Richelle Gemini proves authenticity pays off
Before Richelle Gemini could write a verse, she had already learned how to command a room. By the time she was four years old, she had memorized her mother’s fitness tapes, and her mother, a former homecoming queen and head cheerleader from Port Arthur, took that as a sign. Ballet classes followed. Then pageants, modeling, […]
Black News 
Before Richelle Gemini could write a verse, she had already learned how to command a room. By the time she was four years old, she had memorized her mother’s fitness tapes, and her mother, a former homecoming queen and head cheerleader from Port Arthur, took that as a sign.
Ballet classes followed. Then pageants, modeling, speech and acting classes, tennis, and Sunday mornings leading praise dance at her father’s church. When ballet got too expensive, she did not quit. She started teaching the other girls at church what she had been learning in class, weaving ballet into the choreography of praise dance without missing a beat.
“People tell me I’m so confident on stage,” Gemini says. “I was like, they [parents] made me do it.”
Gemini’s passion for the arts was shaped early by two key teachers. The first, Ms. Marila, instructor at the dance academy Stars in Motion, trained her from ages five to eleven. The lesson she carried longest into her career.
“She would say, if you mess up, that’s part of the dance,” Gemini says. “Do not stop. I put that into my life. If something happens, that’s part of the choreography of it all.” The second is Felicia Holloway, who came into Gemini’s life at twelve after her father’s pastoral calling uprooted the family. Holloway kept her connected to movement and expression during the transition, reinforcing a relationship with the arts that would never break.
She enrolled at the University of North Texas to study broadcast journalism. Her family had spent years calling her Action 13 News for her detailed household reports, but quickly realized it was not her path.
“You have to be non-biased and stick to the script,” she says. “I was not good at sticking to the script.”
She found her way to CAST, a Black theater organization formed on campus because there were not enough Black roles in mainstream productions. She wrote a monologue for an Alpha Phi Alpha event, performed it, and left the stage to a room full of people calling her a poet. She disagreed.
Two classmates put her name on an open mic list without telling her. “I don’t like that word,” she says, recounting the moment someone told her not to be scared. Gemini got up, performed, and never looked back. By 2010, she was competing at slam poetry nationals after a Dallas poet convinced her that the show he had invited her to was actually the regional competition. College bookings followed, and she realized she could get paid for her craft.
“I learned you don’t have to rhyme anymore. You can take this small thing and make it into a big thing. My brain was opened up to a whole other span.”
What followed were years of expansion and hard pivots. She discovered mid-run that she was pregnant, moved back to Houston after her relationship ended, and became a mother of two boys, Lincoln and AJ, who were just 10 months apart.
She returned to UNT and completed her degree in 2015, with concentrations in anthropology, philosophy, and sociology, and a minor in Spanish, all while working night shifts at Memorial Hermann. Through it all, she kept creating.
“I’ve been who I am before I pushed out my kids,” she says. “I didn’t want these circumstances to keep me from what I wanted to do.”
When the boys were old enough, she re-entered Houston’s rap scene as the only woman in H-Town rap battles, making the finals so consistently she became the fan favorite. She eventually found her way into the orbit of a local record label.
However, a label executive told her he thought she was talented but did not know how to sell her. Industry figures pushed her to take outside writers, surrender steep percentages, and conform to what the market wanted from a female rapper.
She declined all of it.
“These are my words,” she says. “I was a poet first. It doesn’t scare me to take away a beat, especially when I didn’t even ask for it.”
Because she stayed true to herself, doors opened that the industry wouldn’t have unlocked, such as lectures at Rice University and the University of Houston, school residencies, and theatrical tours.
For young creatives navigating the same terrain, her advice is to form your LLC, own your name and your masters, and never sign anything without understanding it.
“If you can’t afford a lawyer, thank God for ChatGPT; use it to read your contracts,” Gemini says. “And always look for the word perpetuity.” She pushes back against grind culture just as firmly. “There’s richness in your rest. Your creativity comes out better when you rest.”
Her reading list doubles as a survival guide: The Four Agreements, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, The Alchemist, and The 48 Laws of Power, which she reads for awareness.
“I don’t have to manipulate you to get what I need,” she says. “I’ll just tell you what I need.”
Houston entrepreneur and executive producer Chinara Butler, one of Gemini’s closest friends, has watched that mindset translate into a publishing company built specifically for poets.
“I asked her, how do y’all actually make money doing poetry?” Butler says. “When I looked up, she had a publishing company for poets, teaching them how to turn their poetry into albums, opening doors for commercials, music licensing, all of that.”
Butler, who has spent nearly two decades in the music business, says the gap Gemini is filling is significant.
“I have so much to give. I’m just getting started.”
Richelle Gemini, Grammy Nominated Artist
“Even with Russell Simmons and Def Poetry Jam, that was the biggest platform I’d seen for poets. After that, I haven’t seen one. She’s given poets a gift.” Butler adds that what sets Gemini apart goes beyond business instincts. “My daughter said it best: Richelle wouldn’t be able to exist if she couldn’t be herself. What you see is what you’re getting.”
By 2024, the Grammy nomination arrived the way her best moments always have, right on time. Houston artist Uncle Jumbo invited her to contribute to a children’s album. She brought her son AJ to join the track, and the song landed on Jumbo’s Grammy-nominated Taste the Sky in the Best Children’s Music category.
Gemini has since built an ecosystem entirely around her gift. Through Writers in the Schools, she teaches poetry and performance at three Houston campuses, Audi International, Tinsley, and Benavidez Elementary.
She has lectured at Rice University and the University of Houston, and toured with Ensemble Theater’s hip-hop production of Jack and the Beanstalk at Miller Outdoor Theater and throughout HISD, writing and performing as the mother.
This year, Gemini is releasing a progressive R&B project titled A Giver With Boundaries and a children’s book, Don’t Tell Your Plants to End, due at the end of summer. A debut poetry collection, a documentary, a television poetry series, and a new Houston studio, being built on land inherited by her co-director’s family, are also underway.
“I have so much to give,” she says. “I’m just getting started.”
