Jackie Hill Perry commands the microphone with authority as a Christian poet and hip-hop artist whose central aim is proclaiming the Gospel. During her late teens she started composing and reciting poetry drawn from personal experience, later reshaping that material into hip-hop songs. Her initial recording contract came with the Christian hip-hop imprint Humble Beast, which issued her debut album The Art of Joy in 2014 and the follow-up Crescendo in 2018; she has since moved to Reach Records, the label behind her 2024 EP Practice.
Born Jackie Hill in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 21, 1989, she underwent what she describes as a spiritual awakening before age twenty. That encounter led her to abandon her lesbian lifestyle, embrace Jesus Christ, and rejoin the church in which she had been raised. Her first public appearance as a performance poet took place in 2010 at a Passion 4 Christ Movement gathering, where she delivered several original poems. At the same event she met spoken-word artist Preston Perry; the pair soon began a relationship. While regularly addressing congregations and contributing to Christian periodicals, she also guested on Christian hip-hop podcasts and radio shows, presenting her testimony through verse.
In January 2014 she signed with Humble Beast Records, which released The Art of Joy that November. Later the same year she married Preston Perry and adopted the professional name Jackie Hill Perry. May 2018 brought both her second album, Crescendo, and the memoir Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been. Now on Reach Records, she issued the taut single “First Draft” in June 2024 and shortly afterward the eight-track Practice.
