Kevin Benoit learned the power of voice early. Since age 12, he has helped others find and use their own. This Black History month, SBC highlights and explores the contributions of the 39-year-old self-starter who founded Parlé Magazine over two-decades ago, and, more recently, its arm nonprofit organization, Parlé Endeavors.
Benoit was born and raised in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Originally named Kerven, his parents legally changed his name to Kevin when he turned seven-years-old. The idea was inspired by the movie, Home Alone, particularly when the late Catherine O’Hara, as Kate, screams Kevin’s name, portrayed by Macaulay Culkin.
“My mom watched the movie,” Benoit recalls to So Booking Cool. “I reminded her of the character Kevin. I was just always getting into stuff, and she knew I could handle whatever.”
Outside of school, Benoit was only allowed to go to church and the library. Television was reserved for the weekends and summer months. The Labor Day Parade was an event he looked forward to as it was a cultural staple for Haitians and other Caribbean families like his own. But one year, tragedy struck.
“I remember at 10 years old, this woman got shot, literally outside my window,” Benoit shares. “We were sitting on the fire escape watching the parade go by, and my mom had to throw us — me and my two siblings — back in the house.” He adds that films like Boyz n the Hood, which he later watched, mirrored what he witnessed growing up.
Music and writing were vital outlets for the Catholic school student. In the early 2000’s, the now defunct record label, Murder Inc., spearheaded by the late Irv Gotti, dominated and re-defined the music scene with blazing, chart-topping acts like Ja Rule and Ashanti.
“It became, you need a singer on your hook, you need melodic everything…we went from boom bap rap to you got to have something with some bounce and some R&B…something for the ladies,” Benoit reflects.
“Always on Time” (2001) and “Mesmerized” (2002) both by Ja Rule and Ashanti held the number one and number two spots, respectively, on Billboard’s Hot 100.
Impacted, Benoit decided to write about it for Wingate High School’s newspaper. Instead of experiencing the thrill that many writers who get their first byline feel, Benoit was left disappointed.
“My advisor ended up editing that story to the point where I didn’t recognize it,” Benoit says. “The story had heart, it was speaking to what I was experiencing. I identified with them. They were from Queens, I was from Brooklyn, but I felt their story. I felt their come-up. And that’s not what I was reading, and that was the last story I wrote for that school newspaper.”
While Benoit can acknowledge that his article needed technical editing, especially because he was a young high school student at around thirteen years old, he disagrees with extracting the soul. He vowed not to be in that situation again.
Along with two classmates (one was his best friend and the other was dubbed the “female voice”), Benoit later started the competing school paper, The Wingate Voice. The publication centered Black and Brown youth, reflecting their interests and experiences in ways they had not previously seen.
He shared office space with the guidance counselor and director of the law department. Like writing had always done for Benoit, many students turned to the publication as an outlet — some even revealing their sexual orientation. Even after Benoit graduated, he stayed on as an informal advisor until the school’s leadership threatened to fire the official advisor who oversaw the paper in Benoit’s absence and bar the students from graduation and prom.
“I graduated high school early in June 2003 and then we put out a Valentine’s Day issue for February 2004, and I go to get the final product. We’re talking about the issue, and I’m excited because I’m talking to students, but then the actual advisor is like, ‘yeah, we got to talk…’ ‘That’s how the Wingate Voice ended because I was no longer at the school, so I couldn’t put up a fight, and I couldn’t be the person that had this teacher losing his job. And obviously the students, they didn’t want to have to fight for graduation or prom, so we put out that second issue. Came home, essentially it was over.”
It’s worth noting that Benoit’s academic career included a six-month stint at Beach Channel High School in Queens before he transferred to Wingate, which had been a neighboring school in his hometown. Because he had been bullied, he’d opted for another school. However, while Beach Channel had its flaws, he developed confidence during this time, practicing daily affirmations and joining theatre. He was inspired to make moves at Wingate and leave behind his short-lived basketball aspirations.
When reflecting on the end of the Wingate Voice, the Brooklyn native has this to say:
“It was crushing because I thought we were doing something amazing. Didn’t help that there was no warning or anything. I knew the school was closing down. This is when high schools were being phased out, so in three years the school would no longer exist as I knew it anyway. But I thought I was leaving something behind there, and it was just taken away. Legacy has always been important to me. I think that helped me realize how much I wanted to leave my mark on the world.”
Despite the somber end, his time as a founder, student reporter and Editor-in-Chief was just the beginning. During the summer after his high school graduation, he interned for his best friend’s brother who wanted to launch his own magazine. Benoit was tasked with contacting publicists, earning a monthly $75 stipend.
When the media outlet could no longer afford to pay him, along with the outcome of the Wingate Voice, Benoit looked inward.
“I remember sitting in my English class at John Jay in April 2004 and I’m like, ‘I guess all this just means I need to do my own magazine.’”
He considered using ‘voice’ in the title but preferred to avoid potential conflict or “beef” with outlets like the Village Voice (a media outlet that influenced him). There were other options that ultimately didn’t land. He looked within and found the name.
“Everyone who knows me knows as much as I talk about my Haitian parents, I am very un-Haitian,” Benoit laughs. “I am as American as it gets. But even in that moment, I was still like, ‘I need something that kind of celebrates the culture, celebrates the hood, but be a voice of the community,’ and Parlé just made sense being Haitian. Even though parlay is a French word, it’s still very familiar with Haitians. So that’s how the name came about.”
His internship proved invaluable when launching Parlé Magazine. He’d built relationships with industry professionals who were enthusiastic about his endeavor.
At 17-years-old, he took classes from 8am to noon at John Jay University, then visited a host of record labels to interview artists; intern at a media company in Harlem; and then return to Brooklyn to pick up his young brother from daycare and care for him. “I joke about it now, but I was a teen parent,” he says.
The first issue of the magazine was an interview with Turk, one of the members of Hot Boys, a 1990’s group that was famously signed to Cash Money Records.
“He was popular in New Orleans, in the south, but not really in New York. And the only reason we got the interview was because Turk was locked up. So we did that. It was a great story, and we followed him for years,” Benoit shares.
Benoit peddled to record labels including J Records, Universal Music, Bad Boy, Sony, and RCA (he also visited publishers such as HarperCollins & Simon and Schuster). Copies were distributed at train stations across Brooklyn and Harlem, laundromats, and Golden Krust restaurants. Printing costs, however, were steep.
In seven years, Parlé Magazine produced 33 issues in print before transitioning to digital in 2012, which proved another learning curve for Benoit, who had used tape at the start of the magazine. Then, he had to learn SEO (he didn’t fully understand how to operate digitally until 2017).
This was during the height of the blog era, where trending articles centered new music releases as opposed to interviews.
As he tells students all the time, he didn’t know how to use Photoshop. Nonetheless, the interviews poured in from Lil Wayne, Lloyd Banks, Tyrese, Miguel, Lloyd, Nene Leakes, Kandi Burruss, Mya, Angelo Ellerbee to Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson, and Jonathan Majors, to newcomers SZN4, and many more.
The vision for Parlé Magazine was to tell the story of the journey. Benoit notes that media interest has since shifted toward narratives centered on downfall rather than growth, such as the massive story of the Diddy trial. He also noticed when artists started doing less interviews, instead communicating directly to fans on social media.
“Parlé could have been so much bigger,” Benoit muses. “I’ve met almost everybody I idolized as a child in terms of artists, songwriters, singers, and musicians. I met more people than I can count, some of these people are moguls. Some of these people are entrepreneurs. How many times do you get a 17-year-old to come to your studio, to your office, wherever, to interview you? To not figure out some way to amplify what they’re doing just seems almost like a waste, right? Like, how can you not support someone who is so young doing something right?”
And while Benoit feels he has lacked mentorship throughout his journey, it hasn’t stopped him from mentoring others. In 2022, he founded the nonprofit arm of Parlé Magazine, Parlé Endeavors, which supports youth with various programming. The idea was conceived nearly 10 years prior with the creation of Parlé Teen, which produced youth poetry events and opportunities for them to interview celebrities, and get published in print.
In its first year, Parlé Endeavors gave out multiple scholarships and grants (around $15,000 total), and in the second year of programming, they won a $10,000 grant from Beyoncé’s foundation, BeyGood.
When the organization fell on hard times the following year, it was the reminder of the Beyoncé funding that ultimately propelled them to continue their mission.
“The only way the younger generation really can surpass us and continue to build is if we support their ventures,” Benoit says. “Support financially, support with education, support with mentorship.”
In addition to Parlé Endeavors, a former full-time educator, Benoit also mentors students from the organization, Press Pass NYC, which helps New York City schools develop student-led news publications.
His nonprofit’s Battle of the Boroughs: Teen Poetry Slam, where locals age 13-19 use poetry to share their stories, is tapped to return beginning in May with a variety of events throughout the city. For more information, visit Parlé Endeavors online.