The rapper Angel Haze has been dealing with intense experiences of abuse and family rejection in her music ever since we first met her. And her horrific true-life experiences, as well as her gift for communication, seem like they came in handy in her new gig as an MTV host. On last night’s episode of the hit documentary show Catfish, Haze joined Nev Schulman as a guest co-host. And she also joined Schulman to host Truce, a new show (a one-off for now, but with more to come possibly later) about bringing estranged families together. Haze was the first in a series of Catfish guest hosts this season, and Schulman had some nice things to say about her in a recent interview:

We were in the pre-season, before we started shooting, when we found out we were gonna need some cohosts. We were putting together a list of interesting people who we thought would work and be interested in it. MTV put together a list and one of the names I was looking at was Azealia Banks. So I’m sitting in a car with my mom, dad and a friend of mine. I was going over the list and my friend said, “Oh, well even cooler than Azealia Banks is this girl Angel Haze.” And they had some thing, like, they’d gone toe-to-toe on Twitter a couple years ago. And I thought, “She sounds cool, I want to speak with this girl.” So I looked up Angel Haze and immediately was like, “This is the kind of girl I want on the show.” I hadn’t heard of her before that. I knew of the song “New York” but I hadn’t really paid attention to it. They reached out to her and she was totally down.

I met with her at the same time we were developing this other show, Truce. We got along really well, which was a relief, because we were already slated to do this Catfish episode together. So I decided to bring her on as a co-host for this new show. We’ve become pretty good friends…

She’s a real — and I don’t want Max to read this wrong — but she’s a real artist in a very raw, organic way. She feels a lot and sees things through a unique and artistic lens. As a writer and songwriter, she has a lyrical way of experiencing the world around her and expressing herself. Even the way she speaks, by using time and pauses in her phrasing. Also, she’s a 23-year-old black woman, which is already different from Max. And that’s something we wanted in my co-host. In the special, we were dealing with a black mom and her black daughter. Even though they’re people and I can relate to them in many ways, I can’t relate to them in ways that Angel can. That’s the key we were hoping to get with a female and someone of a different ethnicity. If you can’t say something to me, hopefully you can say it to her. It was miraculous. This episode is crazy amazing, both what happened and how hugely important Angel was to the process.

(via Billboard)

And here are some clips:

You can watch Haze’s full episode of Catfish here.