Eminem Grants Middle School Student Rare Interview

Eminem has granted interviews to publications ranging from Rolling Stone to the New York Times, but he isn’t too big for a middle school newspaper. The Detroit rapper recently hopped on the phone with East Hills Middle School eighth-grader Annie Reed after the 14-year-old was given an assignment to chase an interview with the platinum-selling rapper, a request that he granted after she went through the right channels.

Reed, who writes for her school paper The Cavalier Corner, originally pitched her teacher a biography on the rapper, but was instead told to track him down for an interview. “He grew up in Detroit, he’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, and I thought it’d be fun to write about him,” explained Reed, who emailed Em’s spokesman Dennis Dennehy after finding his contact information.

“I just thought, ‘Wow, here’s a middle school girl from Detroit who has some guts,” said Dennehy. Eminem agreed to do the interview and Reed hopped on the phone with the ‘8 Mile’ star last Thursday, asking him about how Detroit helped him hone his rapping skills, what he listened to at her age and what his favorite song was to perform live.

“It was interesting to hear how he learned from his mistakes,” she said. “He told me that he dropped out of school when he was my age, and I thought about what that would be like for me if I did that right now. Then I thought, ‘I like school!”

The article will be published in the Cavalier Corner, with roughly 500 copies being made available for students at East Hills before Feb. 22.