(Prairie Fire Theme Song) (music) (music) Welcome to Prairie Fire.

I'm Sarah Edwards.

You know, as you get older, you realize that there's really no such thing as a charmed life, most of us, all of us, will face challenges or a crisis or a turning point somewhere along the way.

No one knows that more than a man named Shannon Voss from Champaign, Illinois, he's had more than his fair share of challenges, but he's thriving one goal at a time.

Tinisha Spain has his story.

Good evening, everyone.

My name is Shannon Voss, and I would like to thank God for blessing me with this wonderful opportunity.

I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to commemorate the Parkland graduating class of 2024 2024 Shannon Voss is a 90s baby from Chicago, a super smart kid.

He skipped second grade and graduated at the top of his high school class, all while battling poverty and periods of homelessness.

But that's not the tallest mountain he's had to climb.

Shannon has an incredible story to tell, one with highs lows and some life changing chapters.

This is actually the first time I've been able to actually tell my entire story.

I graduated from high school as the valedictorian, and I received the 34 on the ACT.

I applied to the U of I and I got in.

I was the first in my immediate family who pursued college.

I decided to take a year off from school because my mind wasn't in the right mindset for school, so I figured I'd come back to school after one year of working.

This is when my life changed drastically.

I went to a bar alone and woke up in abandoned house, and I remembered having an excruciating pain coming from my anus.

A week went by and my roommate hadn't seen me, so he broke down my room door and found me unconscious.

I was rushed to Carle Hospital, where they discovered I had HIV and rare case of shingles that had traveled to my brain and caused a series of different problems, like sinus tachycardia, hypomagnesemia, respiratory failure, aspiration pneumonia, Varicella Zoster encephalitis, with disseminated cutaneous Zoster and anoxic brain injury, encephalopathy.

During the beginning of my sickness, I was paralyzed for 95% of my body.

I couldn't walk, talk, eat.

I felt like I was transferred to someone else's body.

His journey to healing started at Carle Hospital in Urbana.

He spent five months in the intensive care unit and another year and a half in the hospital.

At times, Shannon's family was told he might not make it.

The attack and subsequent illnesses left Shannon unable to move.

His first therapy, moving his eyes from side to side.

When patients come to the rehab unit, they get assigned a team.

We were the PT ot team assigned to Shannon.

We were his primary therapist when he was in the inpatient rehab unit at Carle.

It's pretty incredible, honestly, because I think it would have been easy for him to give up on himself and say, This is too hard.

I can't do this really.

I feel like his cheer will pushed him through.

And so to get to see somebody that fought so hard to get his life back.

He has the determination to really do whatever he wants.

You're not going to stop him.

He just has that energy of almost excitement positivity, I mean, constant positivity and.

Infectious.

What really changed for me was a dream I had.

It was August 12, 2012 I will never forget it.

I had a dream that I was graduating from college.

That dream gave me a vision of what my life could be.

I always said, If you can dream it, you can achieve it.

Two months into my first semester returning back to school, I got the worst phone call ever.

My beloved mother had passed away.

This was a pain that I had never experienced before, the woman who loved me unconditionally, the person who prayed for me every night while in Carle hospital, the person who gave me the strength to keep fighting was gone.

I began writing poetry when my mother died, as a way to process all of my unheard pain, I also put all of my despair, anger, sadness into my schoolwork and turned something bad into something good.

Shannon Voss on May 9, 2024, Shannon realized that dream he had in his hospital bed, he walked across the stage and accepted his diploma from Parkland Community College.

He also gave the commencement speech.

What does it mean to truly live?

I have been thinking about that question a lot lately as I near my graduation and close this chapter of my life.

I'm sure a lot of you might be asking the same question yourselves.

Watching him give that speech, was like I was surrounded by people that had no idea why I was there, right?

I didn't know anybody else there, but I was there for seeing it.

And you listen to these people behind you like, oh my gosh, this is incredible.

And I I was a mess because I was a little teeny piece of that, but listening to other people that don't know any of that it was, it was incredible.

Us.

I mean, this was a dream that he had, like, literally, a dream that he had, like, I saw myself graduating from college.

I'm gonna go do it, and then to see him, you know, accomplish that goal, and knowing the work that he had to put in on so many different levels, that truly was like a culmination of all of his work, and exactly like what he'd been through.

And his tenacity working with cartel therapy made me realize that I am someone who has a story to tell.

Whenever I come back to cartel hospital, I feel my mother's presence.

I see a piece of my mother in Renee, Sonia and Monica.

When I was walking to receive my diploma, each step I took, I was stepping on all of my insecurities.

All the times I felt hopeless.

I was also stepping on the old me who thought suicide was an option.

I even saved my mother a ticket to my graduation ceremony.

It was maybe the best, not maybe it was the best speech I've ever heard my life.

And I shed a tear a little bit, and I was able to see him after the graduation.

We got a nice picture together.

So that was it was.

It was just amazing.

Much like his therapy team at Carroll Hospital, Shannon's friends are cheering him on every step of the way as he continues to crush his goals and live a life of purpose and inspiration.

He's goofy.

He's easy to talk to.

Got great jokes.

He just feels like, like a real, like, genuine, down to earth kind of person.

Merely talk to him about anything.

I think is a rare quality for a lot of people.

I met Shannon when I was a student at Parkland.

He just, while I was studying, he just came up to me and was really nice and just asked if he could share a poem.

And it was really, really good.

He's been through so much, but he still is able to, like, maintain such an optimistic, like outlook on everything.

When people who who have been in similar circumstances, I could imagine it would be really difficult to still maintain a smile and, like, maintain like, gratitude for life and everything.

One thing that hasn't changed about myself is the determination I have for making my life the best it can possibly be.

I think I am better, not physically, but mentally.

Today I can say that I am in a very good place.

I hope my story can be of service to others, as a gesture of hope, healing and courage.

This is my destiny, to show others what they may become if they don't give up.

You.

If you take life's experiences, put them to poetry and then put a fat beat underneath, you get hip hop, which is an art form that's been popular since the 1970s each summer, the University of Illinois offers teens a chance to immerse themselves in the culture of creating hip hop.

It's really an opportunity for kids to take risks telling their own stories as they learn from the best in the business.

I want to be a role model.

I want to be recognized for my talent.

I want to make it big.

If you want to come to the University of Illinois, School of Music.

You want to play the euphonium, right?

We already understand what that path looks like for you.

If you want to be a hip hop artist or hip hop producer, where do you start?

The field of music education, historically has not engaged Well, or even at all with hip hop musicians.

Music education as a field Schools of Music broadly, in colleges of music around the country and K 12 practices around the country have often not centralized black American musical practices or black American bodies in spaces.

So the hip hop camp was just something we wanted to try.

We had no idea who was gonna come out or really what it was gonna look like.

It was me and Professor Lamont Holden with a couple of artists and a handful of kids.

And because we were focused on the kids and not a particular product that it had to look like, we had an awesome time, because the kids are amazing and they're brilliant and they're funny and they're weird, and, you know, and they can do amazing things when given the space and the opportunity.

A lot of the youth come to camp already with a lot of experiences around hip hop.

So some of them are already wrapped in, some of them are already making beats.

But we meet, you know, students where they're at.

Really, the camp is just focused on original lyric creation.

We work on, like, how do you hold the microphone?

We work on like, you know, stage presence, things of that nature, so that they're really able to understand that hip hop is more than just, like, you know, writing a rhyme and like, spinning it for your friends.

But it's also like, yeah, you need to understand how to rock a show, how to interact with the crowd, the producing side of things we focus on, like how to use a doll.

So basically, you know, digital audio, audio workstations.

So someone's making a beat, someone else is working on rhymes, and we kind of like collaborate so that they, you know, they can put together a track.

While we're teaching hip hop, we're also teaching students that this is a possible career path, right?

I don't believe that.

Everybody believes that art is a real career, but we need art.

That movie would be really quiet without music.

That drive will be really bad without music, right?

That Quintanilla would be mad dry without music.

We need it.

It's a fact, right?

The value of the music is changing.

The music industry is changing, and I want you to face that head on, because now you got to make a decision.

Do you want to be a star, or do you love music?

And once you decide that you love music, you know you're going to make the music anyway.

Now we have to be more creative and think outside the box about how we get that music out, about how we get the attention of people, about how we get people to listen.

I choose to get it and not wait for it to come.

I choose love over fear.

Hip Hop makes and remakes all the time.

When we have something like a summer camp where kids are coming to make music, I have no idea what they're gonna make.

I don't really know until we meet them, their art, their music, their creation, their expression, that is the central focus.

It is them.

We ask them to be 100% themselves, to bring all of who they are and express that there is no expectation for them to recreate a particular style or to speak on a particular topic, or that they're going to even learn a very specific particular skill set.

They're here to be themselves.

And that is beauty in itself, that is so important, and that is that, I think, is also pretty radical.

I think the most, one of the most special things about hip hop camp is that even though I'm the music educator here, the kids are really the experts.

They are the ones who know the most, and honestly, I learned more from them throughout this week than they learned from me.

They don't have to know what I know.

I love hip hop, but I'm old, and at this point in hip hop, I'm ancient.

So I think having that mix in our camp of the artists who are practitioners of the culture, and then having educators who.

Know a lot of things about teaching and learning, but maybe not specific to hip hop, working together as a team that brings out the best kind of in everybody.

Community within specifically is YM hip hop is so thick and saturated, we all care for each other so much, it's like a family.

So it's like, I'm coming back for, like, it feels like a birthday party, for, like a cookout, you know, rather than I have to go do a job, I have to come teach.

You know, really, it's an ecosystem that sort of sustains itself, because everybody who's there is empowered to be themselves and to bring what they have, and everybody has cultural wealth to bring it's a different mix, not only of different ethnicities and different ages, but also different genre.

We're doing hip hop.

So we have MCs, but we also have singers, and we're making a big show, including both, and keeping the crowd hype when it needs to be, keeping the crowd mellow when it needs to be and creating a space where everybody can have a voice and equally be seen for their music and for who they are.

I am a poet.

I feel welcome.

I'm a producer, I'll say, when I first started my beat, I didn't know what to do at all.

I was just playing with the keyboard, just trying to find something that was like, we started doing this, and I was like, this is hard.

This is really difficult to do.

But like, you know, I had these amazing leaders, these counselors who were by my side, walking me through every step.

They were there for me.

And I appreciate them so much.

It's really great, even to show like rookies the ropes.

And I feel like, I feel it's kind of special.

It's like, heartwarming to getting to see them like I was there in their place, like five years ago, but now I'm teaching them how to do it, and it's just it feels really awesome.

Everybody's on their own different type of music journey.

Now everybody's gonna be a pro at everything, and everybody's nervous at one point.

I'm noticing that this space is teaching kids how to have grace with themselves with something so vulnerable as music, that's their baby, but knowing that sometimes the intent is great, but learning that there is a joy in having grace with yourself if it's not as perfect as you think, if it's not as finished, and teaching them that it's okay each part of their journey and each part of their creativity is worthy.

It doesn't matter if it's complete or not.

When I even heard that there was a performance at the end of the week, I was actually begging my mom to unenroll me from the camp.

I'm scared, but you know, it's my first time performing on stage like it's also really exciting.

So it's we promote that we are everybody's number one fan, even if you have experienced artists who are more used to being on stage that definitely helps with confidence building.

When people are on the mic, they're testified, you can't simulate that in any other space.

You have to be together, and you have to share that experience together, because it's not just about you speaking your truth, it's about you speaking your truth in a context of other people who are hearing your truth and receiving that.

It's really just like a relief, honestly, like I get to showcase all my family and friends.

What I've been learning here.

The best part is, when people are singing your lyrics back to you the ones that you wrote, what's the greatest feeling?

It's definitely a lot different when you go to like canopy Club, where all these big people have performed, and it's like, wow, someone's actually like taking time out of their day to come here and listen to someone else rap on my beat that I made.

I don't know.

It's just kind of cool to that the community will like, come together for something like this camp.

Maybe more so now than ever, the economic challenges of putting on a camp like this are real and present, and so what's worth it to go through this kind of administrative hurdles and the institutional challenges and the fundraising you know that needs to happen in order to make this accessible and valuable?

It's the people.

So if I was to name like, what are the things I'm most excited about and most proud about, about the camp I would just give you a list of names of people, and I would point to their albums, and I would point to the work they've done and the people they've become this week.

This is swine camp week.

Is quite literally the highlight of my year.

This is the standout week that I look forward to every year.

To the young children take a.

Advantage of these opportunities.

This is crucial.

You guys are young.

You guys are still being molded into who you are gonna be.

If you guys start now, believe in yourself, be inspired and work you will be great.

I'm a masterpiece mastering piece.

You I am enough.

I am talented, I am worthy.

I am me.

And finally, when the artist Kevin Vieira from Edinburg, Illinois, graduated from high school, he didn't have any clue what he wanted to do with his life, he said it was like being dumped in the middle of a field, but since then, he has Built a celebrated career out of his childhood obsession.

You my mom watched children, and there was a young lady by the name of Nikki, and her parents were hippies, and hippies, when they have birthday parties, everybody gets a gift, and my gift was this book.

And this is the Peterson Field Guide to the birds.

And this book opened up my world, like, I'm like, What is this stuff, man.

So I would have been seven, and she would get me notebooks, and I would literally just write all the birds down over and over and over and over.

I had no plans for college or anything.

I didn't even think about it.

So I had been doing my own thing, and there was a point where I decided I want, I want to do more painting.

I had a portfolio by the time I was 18, filled with watercolor paintings and birds that I really liked, and I went to Springfield College in Illinois, and the sister there, she saw my works, and she just pushed my paperwork through, says, You need to be in college now, before I was just painting to try to learn the craft.

But then when I got into grad school, I wanted to paint something with meaning, I guess, something with some kind of weight to it, and so I got into minimalism.

I was really attracted to minimalism for a long time, but then by the end, I was kind of over it.

I have a friend, Bob sill who works at the Illinois State Museum, and I went in there a few years ago, and I said, Dude, what's modernism?

I'm trying to be relevant here.

And he says, Dude, just paint wherever you want.

And I said, cool, I like painting birds.

And that was that I found an old, early American quilt design.

People would have this in their house.

It was a fruit tree, usually embroidered with a partridge at the base of it.

And I'm just gonna blame that picture right there for everything that has happened since.

It ended up being a really good way to arrange your paintings and then all this stuff behind it.

I It just is what it is.

I don't know how it got there.

That's just the way it is.

They're very designy.

You know, could turn these things into wallpaper?

I guess they're very flat and designing.

And I'm okay with that.

That's where they ended up.

I paint birds, but I don't consider myself a bird painter.

I like birds, but in most cases, they're not anatomically correct.

I became fascinated with tattoos because I had discovered in grad school.

It was called the Japanese tattoo, and it was a picture book of full body Japanese tattoos, and I loved the imagery, and I loved the way it made the body look.

I've been doing it for 33 years now.

Whenever people ask me, why Kevin, I always say, because he's an artist first.

And so some people look at, you know, the tattoos other people have done first when picking their artist.

But I looked at his art first and thought, if he can commit to that and make.

Things beautiful with a paint brush.

Then, obviously, I'm a painter who does tattoos, but I'm not a tattoo artist.

I awake watching there's no change in your breathing.

Is this the doll?

The premise of my studio is underfoot studios.

It's about things that are overlooked, things I really care about, are fascinated and realize that 99.9% of the population doesn't even know these things exist.

For Illinois, we're out in the sticks and the back side of the studio, two feet out, and you go off a cliff and it overlooks the South Fork of the Sangamon.

I usually do a painting a month, and the reason is, is that that is something I can actually accomplish.

And a painting a month means 50 to 70 hours in the studio a month.

So it's weird when people hear how i paint.

I don't mix colors, these colors.

I have a bunch of these film canisters with the color that I'm gonna use, and there'll be gradations.

And as time has gone on, I end up using about the same four or five colors for everything.

It's all purples, pinks and browns.

I'll go years where I don't like anything I do, but you can't get from point A to point B without going through the middle.

You can't just stop.

You paint a picture, you take what you like, what you're doing, and you move it to the next one, and things get left behind.

And then, as you go on, things get left behind, living out here, my calendar is broken into birds arrivals and birds departures.

I just enamored with them in their life histories and things.

If I can get one person to get interested in birds, the birds lead to the environment.

And if they could get interested in environment, they might just chuck a few bucks at the Audubon Society or Sierra Club, or Nature Conservancy or something like that.

My place will be a part of the Illinois nature preserve.

The House and the studio will be part of Friends of the Sangamon Valley, which is a nature conservation organization.

I hope there are paintings out that are out there in the collections.

I'm hoping that I made it a little bit better than when I showed up the end.

I we have a list of where you can see Kevin Vieira's paintings on our website, and that's where you can find information on all of our stories.

Visit will.illinois.edu/prairiefire.

I'm Sarah Edwards.

We leave you with more scenes of performances from Hip Hop Camp.

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