Hearing her tell it, you’d think emoniFela has been making music for a number of years. The truth of the matter is she’s not old enough to vote in next week’s election and when she was born, the emerging medium for recorded music, CDs, came in long, rectangular cardboard packaging. Yet at age 17, the high school graduate has already rocked stages on both the West and East coasts while rubbing elbows with the likes of KRS-One and D.C.’s hip-hop elite.

She’s in control of her career, from the rhyme writing to show bookings to even doing public speaking. She is her own brand and is proof positive of her belief that determination will take you a long way. With all this accomplished at a time most people her age are gearing up for college, emoniFela seems well on the way to making herself a force to be reckoned with in hip-hop, as we picked up from our conversation with her while she’s working in Los Angeles.

Visit emoniFela online at: myspace.com/emonifela

Questions for emoniFela:

Right now you’re in L.A. What are you doing out there?

I’m out here working on my album. I’m also out here working on another project with some fam of mine named Reasone. I have a show. I didn’t intend to do a show but that’s how it worked out.

How did you get your start?

I was born in 1991, believe it or not. I’m a youngin’. I haven’t been rapping that long. I started out as a poet and a DJ. Then I became a freestyle emcee and now I’m doing what I do. All of this was a product of me being exposed to so many different things, spending winters in D.C. with my mom and summers in L.A. with my dad. My 4th grade teacher started taking me to open mics and that’s where everything started happening for me. I started meeting producers and meeting other artists. Those places were the only spaces where people accepted me for myself as opposed to just being a young person. Since then I’ve just been grinding.