Miami’s budding world of poetry and spoken-word performance lost a defining voice early Sunday after gunmen shot and killed local poet Will “Da Real One’’ Bell outside the North Miami cafe where he had plied his trade for years and given a venue to countless other wordsmiths.
Bell, 47, whose performances have been featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, had just closed his business, the Literary Cafe and Poetry Lounge on 933 NE 125th Street, at about 12:40 a.m. and was walking to his car nearby when another car occupied by at least two men pulled up beside him, said Lt. Neal Cuevas of the North Miami Police Department.
A gunman leapt out from the passenger seat and fired multiple times at Bell, who died on the scene, Cuevas said. The men then fled in the car, but did not take any of Bell’s possessions, which included cash and jewelry.
“We don’t have a motive right now,’’ Cuevas said.
Several witnesses, who had been inside The Literary Cafe earlier that night, offered police differing descriptions of the suspects’ car color as light and dark, with a spoiler on the rear.
Bell will be missed in South Florida’s poetry and spoken-word performance scene, where he loomed as a local laureate, having achieved national recognition with performances on Def Poetry Jam and on albums by artists such as Miami’s Pit Bull, and hosting open-mic nights at his Literary Cafe and other venues.
Standing nearly 6-feet-5, Bell cast an imposing presence on stage, where he delivered prose honed from a life of poverty, fatherlessness, crime and prison — before finding redemption through words.
