She's a teacher, writer, entrepreneur, and, until recently, hard-Googling trivia hostess. You probably know her as Dessa — 28-year-old poet, emcee and lone female in Twin Cities hip-hop collective Doomtree.

"I work seven days a week on something," says Dessa, whose first full-length solo album, "A Badly Broken Code," drops on Jan. 19.

Dessa has an undergraduate degree in philosophy from the University of Minnesota. She wanted to pursue the subject not as an ivory tower academic but as a real-world practitioner. "For me, that ended up being essays and rap music," she says.

Dessa also teaches two days a week — songwriting and the language of hip hop and spoken word — at McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul.

Much of her remaining time goes to helping the nine-member Doomtree crew run its label. Her specialty is writing promotional material.

Apart from music, Dessa hosted a weekly trivia contest at Nomad World Pub, though she recently relinquished those duties to lighten her schedule. She relished the hours spent online researching questions.

If that's not enough, Dessa is also a freelance technical writer and published author. She released "Spiral Bound," a collection of essays last year, and is working on a new volume of "creative non-fiction."

I assemble my verses and choruses in a piecemeal fashion. I have a document that I use to catch all of my ideas as they arrive. To assemble a song, I'll cull promising sections from that document. For bus rides and long walks, I have a Moleskine (notebook).

I get nervous singing in the studio so I sing all my stuff in my closet. I'm shy about singing the same line 20 times with people waiting for me to get it right. I've sewn these blankets together that latch onto hooks that I've drilled into the walls and ceiling. The blankets drape around me to make a second-rate sound booth. I sing into a microphone, the signal goes into a pre-amp and then into my computer.