Standing in her small kitchen, donning an orange spacesuit and rapping into a microphone held by a helmeted astronaut, Zhalarina Sanders ’15, MS’18 isn’t messing around.
Well, maybe she is — but it’s part of her creative process.
Sanders is a rapper who publishes under the mononym Zhalarina. She was 11 years old when she wrote her first bars, and she continued to hone her craft in high school through spoken-word poetry before discovering First Wave, UW–Madison’s hip-hop and urban arts scholarship program.
“I was like, ‘That’s me. That’s where I need to be. That’s the next step,’ ” she says.
As a member of the program’s fifth cohort, Sanders grew not only in her writing, but also in bringing it to life on both stage and screen. Her final undergraduate performance was a one-woman play titled Rose Goldthatexamined Black motherhood through five distinct characters. Shortly after graduating with her master’s degree in counseling psychology, she released The Light, a music-video series that went on to win a regional Emmy.
“First Wave was the biggest tool of empowerment for me as an artist,” Sanders says. “I thought that I needed so much more outside of me to be able to do the art that I wanted to do, and being a student in First Wave showed me that I really just need a computer and a camera and a mic.”
That mentality continues to serve Sanders in her postgrad career. In 2021, she released her first album, Again, complete with full-length music videos and short clips featuring an even larger cast of Sanders-portrayed characters: Queen Latifah, Nicki Minaj, a boxer, a gym bro, a camp counselor, an astronaut. The videos reveal an artist who is as much a performer as she is a poet, and her lyrics are as masterfully constructed as they are deeply rooted in lived experience.
Sanders is many things — a writer, rapper, poet, playwright, producer, actress — but above all, she’s a storyteller.
“It’s in my DNA,” she says. “My mom, if you hear her tell a story, it feels like you’re [in the] front row at a theater. She’s dramatic, and she has plot lines, and she knows how to build anticipation and suspense.”
“I come by it honest,” Sanders says, “and I started creating when I was six, so my work has rarely been devoid of story.”
On Again and its 2022 follow-up, Perfect, Sanders raps in plain-spoken English about her hometown of Tampa; her mother, Diji; her father’s struggles with addiction and incarceration; and mental health. Her latest projects, Pearlsand Pearls 2, use pig latin to process past and present adversity.
“[Speaking pig latin] has always been a family thing, and it predates me for at least 60 or 70 years,” Sanders says. Her grandmother, the daughter of sharecroppers in Adel, Georgia, learned pig latin from a popular Froot Loops commercial and spoke it with friends while working in the fields. Learning the language became a rite of passage in Sanders’s family, and it functions in her lyrics as an homage to her strong-willed lineage.
“I want to do something that shows my heart,” she says. “If I’m made of anything that’s not skin and bones, it’s probably music.”
