About
Me

I have always been obsessed with the following question: Does Philly have an identifiable sound? Not accent but frequency. I would say yes. I can hear it in rappers like Beanie Sigel, Black Thought, and Tierra Whack. In singers like Bilal and Jazmine Sullivan and in poets like Ursula Rucker and Black Ice.

I started writing in college as a response to racism. What at first grew into a wordless anger was then put into form through poetry. My first experiences of watching slam poetry specifically made that possible for me. The content of my early poems was blatantly and intentionally political but the structure and performance of these poems came as a direct result of my lived experience. I wanted to push the boundaries of how I could make sense of the world around me. In those early writing days, I would take an idea and manipulate it to explain what I needed to say. The open mic on my college campus in a racially homogenous Western Pennsylvania became my balm.

I have taken many poetry workshops, courses and gone on retreats which have all been extremely enriching but the skills I acquired from observing and interpreting Black life on the block was the ultimate curriculum. The fights and celebrations; the evasions and stoop watching seeped in the DNA. Now, through my writing, I explore, honor, and ask questions of Black people's intra-racial dynamics: how we see each other, talk to one another, express our beliefs and modes of holding each other accountable in both the public and private spheres.

My undergraduate training is in Molecular Biology. It was in this space where I discovered my passion for research as a way to get to the bottom of physical phenomena.

I truly believe that when we sit down to make, we are extending legacy. It has been of utmost importance for me to research those voices who I have found to be of my same lineage, study their work and begin an artistic conversation with them. These conversations run the gamut from poetic to scientific in form and in content.

In my writings this has shown up as “exploring psychological terrain” (as the poet Yusef Komunyakaa would put it). My ideas begin first with deep inquiry into news headlines, historical events, pop culture, Black internet culture, African diaspora scholarship, and Black music traditions. Many days and nights spent tracking the growth of cells and documenting morphological changes under varying conditions sharpened my eye for going from image to text.

It’s the same with writing. I develop an image in my mind and try to translate it line by line, sentence by sentence.

My work questions respectability politics and political norms in the Black community. I push myself and my many audiences to face uncomfortable truths and to give language to the unnamable.

I think home shifts all the time. Right now, home for me is near the water. Recently, I've been taking weekly trips to Boat House Row. I like to sit by the water, watch the swans and the geese. I love the people watching there, and seeing all the fish. It can be very serene. There, I feel very at one with the atmosphere.

But, my friends are also my home these days. I have two best friends who I speak to almost every day on the phone. They live in Boston and Buffalo, so there's a bit of distance between us but I always feel like I get that feeling of safety and the ability to be my complete self.