Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I am a Black, Malaysian, and gay American woman. I worked as a policymaker and abolitionist lawyer long enough to understand that the line between imagination and reality is thin. Imaginings become stories, which become culture, which becomes law. It is no great leap to understand that the U.S. thrives as a violent, white supremacist nation because the dreams, wonders, and visions of people of color have been systematically excluded from its collective imagination. 

I write in order to dream what it means to be well as humans, especially Black humans. My fiction explores wild concepts of liberation, new Black and Brown ontologies, and alien epistemologies. The unreal is a site of vast potential. I am convinced that there is no wellness without the unfettered dreams of science fiction, fantasy, and—yes!—horror. Writing from this context there are no genres, only the yearning to nourish new ways of being.

While at Headlands

“Little sounds of dawn arrived. A bird singing, the road groaning, leaves uncurling. Pollen readying to burst. At the edge of the cemetery, crowded green and yellow from spring rain, a woman in a scoop necked blue linen dress dotted with cream dots stood. The woman picked one leg, and then the other, free of the grave. She did this with deliberate and overdone slowness, as though to prove that she, like anyone else, was disturbed by muck and mess. As though the most onerous thing in her world was choosing where to stand.”

I look forward to tinkering with stray stories and sentences (such as those above!); revising my novel, Happiness, a Black American Gothic tale of Ada Scott and the man she killed when she was twelve; and enjoying an abundance of time, natural light, and friendly human and animal encounters.  

Selected Work

Endria Richardson, “Love and Affection.” Black Warrior Review, issue 48.2.

Endria Richardson, “The Generosity of Trees.” Bay Nature, March 30, 2021.

Endria Richardson, “The Body of Climbing.” Alpinist, 2020.

Endria Richardson, “The Black Menagerie.” Lightspeed issue 137, October 2021, .

Endria Richardson, “Do Nothing.” Lightspeed issue 133, June 2021.

Endria Richardson, “The Field Tiger.” Clarkesworld issue 175, April 2021.