“I wrote this book to reassure you that you are not worthless, stupid, or going to die alone. You are a queen. You just happened to lose your way. You just happened to let your crown get crooked,” this is an excerpt from “Queenish” by Plaserae Passley.
Passley has worn many crowns herself and is an individual who has set the path for many young Javelinas who are in the same shoes she was in just six short years ago.
Passley, who goes by the penname Perceptual Plazz, got her start as a journalist with the student publication The South Texan. With an iron will to succeed and the tools to do it, Plazz let her competitive nature influence her work in the office.
“Plazz was an extremely hard worker, and she was also very driven and I think that’s because she was so competitive on the athletic side of her life that she brought that same spirit into the newsroom. So she was always striving to do better and be the best she could always be,” Professor and Adviser for student media Nicole Morris said.
On top of being a student worker and excelling in the classroom, Plazz gave it her absolute all to Javelina nation and to head track and field coach Ryan Dall earning herself a national championship.
“Plazz was a great athlete, super sprinter, national champion with us on our four-by-one, and she was a great person and I think in her time here she definitely grew as a person which was great to see and she was just a lot of fun for me to be able to coach,” Dall said.
Now that Plazz has been in the real world for six years she has published two books, and one of those two books was written while working for The South Texan and chasing greatness on the track.
“In ‘Perseverance is My Power’ I think my mind was just on that I’ve made it this far pretty much on my own or on the strength that God has given me, and I want other people to know that they can do it too. I was very stressed during ‘Perseverance is my Power’ because I was a senior, and I was also a female sports editor at The South Texan. I was also a national track and field contender so I was traveling a lot and so those things made me kind of stressed,” Plazz said.
Plazz took strong pride in succeeding for herself and her school, but now that she has become a mother, she has credited her daughter as her inspiration for her book “Queenish.”
“Physically when I wrote ‘Queenish,’ I was extremely pregnant with my now toddler. I was pregnant and it was in the midst of Covid and I just figured since we couldn’t go outside, we had to go inside and do the self-work that we needed to do because we had the opportunity,” she said. “I was talking to one of my girlfriends and she said she feels like God was kind of putting us in timeout during Covid, and I used my timeout to do some self-reflection, and also not only wanted to better myself, but I was giving birth to a girl and I wanted my daughter to be an excellent woman so part of my book was to her.”
Becoming what Plazz has become paves a path for many other Javelinas with big dreams and aspirations, as some students are or have been in the very same shoes trying to make a name and a career for themselves “I think she serves as an example that the sky is the limit, and you don’t have to just place yourself in one lane. I think the experiences you get here at A&M Kingsville and at The South Texan, specifically, really can set you up for different paths and really any path you want to choose,” Morris said.
