Chancelier “Xero” Skidmore is a poet, actor, musician, and educator from Plaquemine, Louisiana. He was born to a teenage mother and a father who already had another family. It was just him and his mom until she married his stepfather three years later. Although Chancelier received unconditional love from his mother, his stepfather was a source of constant physical abuse. A love for music, television, movies, and drawing proved to be a lifesaving coping mechanism throughout his childhood and teen years.

He became a father after his second year of college. This was the birth of his first child, Shanti. The relationship with Shanti’s mother didn’t last very long, but Chancelier did all he could to remain connected to the new apple of his eye. With new responsibilities he dropped out of school to work full-time, while the constant urge to create lingered. He got together with some childhood friends and started a rap group (Subway 504). They got a record deal, but an album never materialized. Once the group disbanded, he took his lyrics to open mic poetry events in Baton Rouge and started making a name for himself as a very imagistic writer and a captivating performer. The open mic events led to poetry slam competitions. Local competitions led to national competitions and high national rankings led to college feature shows, which were his first paid gigs.

While still in the mode of doing spoken word shows, a local youth worker saw him perform and thought he’d be a great fit for a theater-based youth non-profit program she was running, called City At Peace. After a few workshops as guest teacher, he was soon hired as Program Director and this led to many years of non-profit work in the realms of education, programming, and administration. He taught with Big Buddy Programs, served as Executive Director of Forward Arts, Inc., grant-writer for Of Moving Colors, and wore several hats at the Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge. These were all day jobs. At night, he continued to perform poetry and also started working as a percussionist with a local brass band, The Michael Foster Project.

After over 15 years of working as a professional poet (2013 Individual Poetry Slam World Champion), musician, and teaching artist, he met Ann Omoike and started a new family. This was exciting. He had been a father for 23 years now, but throughout Shanti’s childhood she had bounced back and forth between his residence and her mom’s. By the time she came to live with Chancelier permanently, she was 16 years old. So, he looked forward to experiencing fatherhood in a more around-the-clock fashion. Between 2015 and 2021, he and Ann had three boys, Oyafoh, Okoro, and Osezua, all bearing names from Ann’s Esan tribe in Benin City, Nigeria.

In 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic shut down all of his artistic outlets. The lack of art making, coupled with the pressures of day-to-day parenting, triggered some unresolved traumas, namely the physical and psychological abuse that was suffered throughout his childhood. The beatings, the death threats, being forced to watch his mother and siblings be brutalized; all those thorns that had never been removed, had been slowly festering psychologically. Maybe it was the fact that he grew up in a household as the oldest of three boys, and now it was him who was raising three boys…deathly afraid that he might do as many victims of abuse have done, lose control and harm his own children. It was Ann who urged him to see a therapist about his anxiety and depression, which proved to be a more realistic approach to dealing with those traumas than art had ever been.

Chancelier now spends his time getting used to public performances again, getting used to teaching again, and pushing himself to further refine his newer talents. During the pandemic he got serious about his voice-over work, creating a home studio and doing more than simply waiting for the next gig to fall in his lap. While in the process of maximizing those opportunities he won the 2019 National Golden ADDY award for his writing and performance, then started getting more work for television and web commercials that included being in front of a camera. This prompted him to start taking acting classes again, start writing poems again, start memorizing some of his older classics, and to start breathing the open air as an artist again…a fully vaccinated and boosted artist!

The world is, once again, a clean slate. It needs artists to fill it up with poetry, dialogue, lesson plans, and lyrics. Chancelier is ready to contribute more than his fair share of vandalism to that clean slate. If our civilization is to survive, it needs art… probably more now than it ever did. Chancelier is overjoyed to be back to work , giving back to the world what has sustained him for so long.