On Canal Street with the self-described evangelist, who insists her latest pivot isn’t a reinvention: “I’m just myself.”

Woah Vicky, the 26-year-old content creator and internet celebrity famous largely for being Woah Vicky, has a trick for when she doesn’t feel like talking. It’s a postcard-perfect summer day in Lower Manhattan, and she’s searching Canal Street for a knockoff Chanel bag she spotted earlier. We don’t get far before a fan stops her for a picture. She usually obliges. But every so often, someone approaches and asks whether she is, in fact, Woah Vicky.

“No,” she says sharply, before darting off in the opposite direction.

The stranger stands there, stunned. This is Woah Vicky. But, for the moment, it also isn’t.

Vicky, born Victoria Rose Waldrip, is in town for her first-ever poetry reading. She announced the event on Twitter 10 days earlier, and tickets sold out almost immediately. She’s wearing a yellow two-piece shorts set from Los Angeles Apparel with gel slippers, appropriate for the weather. She respectfully says hello to each vendor, most of whom are from Senegal, and promises to pray for them. She briefly pulls out her phone to look up how to say “How are you?” in Wolof, one of Senegal’s most widely spoken languages. “Na nga def?” she shouts to every vendor we pass, to which they reply, “Maa ngi fi rekk”: “I’m fine.”

The reading was organized by Abhimanyu Janamanchi, the co-founder and brand director of menswear brand le PÈRE, and Astra Publishing House editor Maya Raiford Cohen as part of the store’s Salon du Livre series. It would consist largely of Vicky reading a selection of her own tweets constructed as poems. As philosophical texts, they offer an oddly uplifting portrait of modern life. “At the end of the day the day gotta end,” one recent post reads. It’s the earnest wisdom of a megachurch pastor, stripped down until it reaches the audience at its most elemental level. (Vicky now describes herself as an evangelist and would spend much of our afternoon talking about God.) Other names on the bill this evening include Caroline Calloway, whose memoir Scammer was for sale at the event, and author Avigayl Sharp, who read from her recent debut novel Offseason, about a young woman who takes a job teaching English at an all-girls boarding school while trying to escape her own life.

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Janamanchi says le PÈRE has tried to make the store a home for eclectic programming. Cohen, who co-runs Salon du Livre with him, wanted the series to feel “playful and totally unexpected,” a departure from the stiff routine of most readings and book launches. She had been a fan of Vicky’s tweets for a while. “Something about her affect feels intensely relatable and endearing,” Cohen says. Cohen does not consider herself religious, though she admires Vicky’s spirituality and what she calls her “innate wisdom and a singular voice.”

The reading drew a ravenous crowd packing the modestly sized Lower East Side storefront so tight that beads of sweat might as well have begun dripping from the walls. That so many people now describe themselves as “huge fans” of Vicky is its own kind of plot twist. She first became famous through what could charitably be described as trolling. In the summer of 2017, when she was 17, she posted videos claiming she was Black and spoke in exaggerated Southern AAVE (she has a poem about this). She used the n-word and drew accusations of cultural appropriation. Every wave of outrage widened her audience. By April 2018, after months of online threats with Bhad Bhabie, the two met in a filmed confrontation while a 10-year-old Lil Tay stood beside Vicky. The encounter became another viral event. She has since popped up on feeds in impressively absurd scenarios, like when she was fake-kidnapped in Nigeria (she’s got a poem about this, too), or during her brief romance with looksmaxxing guru Clavicular. (They at one point shared the same publicist.)

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When tickets sold out within minutes, and the announcement began ricocheting around Twitter, Cohen says she and Janamanchi looked at each other and asked, “What did we render?” Janamanchi figured some people would come for an ironic spectacle. As the night progressed, he saw “a genuine thoughtfulness in the room.” The readers had been selected because none sounded like the next. The oddness of the bill was part of the appeal.

After the opening acts, Vicky took the stage like a member of a church congregation ready to deliver a testimony. She opened by leading the crowd in prayer, to which the room full of twentysomething cultural connoisseurs initially laughed, before one by one they began nodding in prayer, as if shedding a layer of ironic artifice and surrendering themselves at the altar of Vicky’s tabernacle. With a wry sense of humor, she read about her father apparently asking her mother to get an abortion. “There almost wasn’t a Vicky to say Woah to,” she said. The crowd laughed. In another poem, she said she hoped to adopt autistic children once she was more settled, and the crowd laughed again. It was hard at times to tell whether the room was moved by her or amused by itself. Vicky kept going.

“Part of Vicky’s charm lies in her earnestness,” Janamanchi says. He doesn’t think people would have spent the time or money to attend unless her appeal had already begun to change. “As Vicky shared in one of her poems, she’s just ‘doing her best.’”

Though she seemed nervous at first, Vicky quickly reached something of a flow state, delivering her endearingly honest stream-of-consciousness tweets with an unvarnished openness that was genuinely moving. Art is meant to connect at an emotional level, and Woah Vicky, a product of the internet’s totalizing gaze, has emerged as something of a spiritual figure. She’s been cancelled, kidnapped, and bamboozled, happy to tell anyone who’ll listen, and who’ll excuse her typos.

Earlier that day, Vicky tells me she lived with her mother until she was six, then later met and lived with her father, whom she describes as “rich” but emotionally absent. 

When I ask how she found religion, she interrupts herself.

“I want to show you the family that took me in.”

She pulls out her phone and scrolls for a moment before turning the screen toward me. The photo is of a large Black family gathered in the front yard of a modest house, parents at the center, children and teenagers fanned out around them. Everyone is smiling. Everyone appears related. Everyone except Vicky. Near the middle of the group stands a pint-sized teenage Vicky, pale and bleach-blonde, sticking out like a sore thumb.

“That’s me,” she says, tapping the screen.

She explains that the family “basically adopted” her when she was 17. They introduced her to Christianity and, in a less obvious way, helped create the internet persona that would eventually make her famous. When she moved in, they became convinced that her peculiar cadence, unfiltered confidence, and habit of saying exactly what came to mind were tailor-made for the internet. “They were like, ‘You could go viral because of the way you speak,’” she tells me.

Looking at the photograph, it’s easy to imagine them arriving at that conclusion. Vicky doesn’t resemble anyone else in the picture, but she doesn’t quite sound like anyone else, either.

“They had seven brothers and sisters,” she says, before pointing out one of the sons in the photo. “I want to marry one of the older brothers.”

I tell her that sounds awkward.

“Why? No,” she says. “If anything, we know each other really good. And he’s really handsome, and he provides for his whole family. He’s waiting till marriage.”

This is the part of Vicky that makes the poetry reading feel less like a stunt than a logical extension of the whole project. Her tweets emerge quickly, often while she is alone, listening to sermons, or trying to catch a thought before it disappears. “If I think of something good, something comes to my mind, or I hear something good, I just do it right then and there,” she says, “because if I don’t do it, I won’t ever do it.”

Why post them instead of saving them privately?

“Because why not?” she says. “They’ve been going viral.”

When I ask what motivates her each day, she answers without hesitation: “God. The Bible. Jesus. Gospel music.” She doesn’t call it religion, she says. “I call it a relationship with God.”

At the reading, that relationship becomes the organizing principle. Vicky is not exactly trying to prove she is a poet in the traditional sense. She is treating virality, pain, faith, and performance as parts of the same testimony. Her mother has stayed with her at times, she says, but the arrangement has repeatedly broken down. “But it’s okay. She’s sober now. Thank God.”

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When I ask whether it’s difficult to share material that personal in front of an audience, Vicky shrugs.

“No,” she says. “It’s a part of my testimony. Other people are going through it too.”