Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I am a fourth generation Black San Franciscan on both sides. I am an interdisciplinary writer who is most at home in prose. It is my life’s work to build community through storytelling. Through writing, education, and activism I do my part to end mass incarceration and imagine a future without prisons or jails. 

In my work I explore themes of belonging and grief. I am often investigating joy and considering how to write about it authentically. I do my research, testing how much of it I can make out of nothing. I write for my ancestors and my community, in the lineage of other Queer Black writers, for all of us who dare to be queer, black, and free at the same time, and for all of us who cannot or could not.

While at Headlands

Over the years I have catalogued the many structural changes I’ve observed in San Francisco: fires in the Mission with gaping black holes left between buildings, each of my neighbors disappearing to suburbs far away, and my childhood home being resold year after year for millions of dollars. Many of the changes I’ve recorded describe the reality of a new San Francisco, which serves as a sort of dystopian fiction. Alongside this disorienting change, I’ve begun to catalogue a history of my own family—bail amounts alongside high rises, new babies alongside demolished housing projects, a lost aunt in the tenderloin alongside the salesforce tower. While at Headlands I will be cultivating this work of creative nonfiction.

Selected Works

“Capitol + Broad,” in Open Space (SF MoMA online publication), June 2019

“All Gays Go to Heaven,” in Mala Forever: Pulp Dreams (Pride Issue), July 2019

“Music Is a Miracle,” in Argot Magazine, May 2019

“Still Here,” in Radar Productions: GLOW Queer Poetry Feature, June 2019
Also available in print within Still Here San Francisco Anthology