WRITING
WORDS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MY HOMEPLACE
Poetry, essays, and experimental publications rooted in Black feminist Southern memory, repair, and designing livable futures.
The page is not separate from public life. It is one of the places we learn how to live together.
SELECTED WORK
Working the Roots
Poetry Collection · Querencia Press · 2025
Working the Roots traces the underground connections among Black women’s bodies, Southern land, inherited history, health, and intimate relationships.
Through poems that move between lyric and prose forms, the book refuses the fiction that place, memory, illness, desire, and care belong to separate stories. They form a root system that carries what has wounded us, what keeps us alive, and the knowledge Black women use to repair ourselves and one another.
MORE WRITING
Across Forms
EXPERIMENTAL PUBLISHING
Theory Out the Trunk
With Omaria Sanchez Pratt · 2026
An experimental Black queer and trans Southern creative-critical studio and zine series built to move theory out of institutions and into the places where we gather, create, and design livable worlds.
SHORT FICTION
Lay Your Head on My Pillow
Murder Journal · Issue 1
A Southern Gothic story about a Black woman who seeks revenge and finds a new name for herself in the process. Moving through violence, desire, and self-invention, the story examines the racial and gendered roles she has been made to inhabit and what it costs to step outside them.
CRITICISM
Review of We Are Owed.
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies · 2024
A review of Ariana Brown’s We Are Owed. that reads grief as a portal of haunting, an opening through which lost kin, erased histories, and ancestral presence become newly perceptible.
Placing Brown’s poems within Black feminist literary genealogies, the essay traces how mourning can become more than an experience of loss, transforming into a method for understanding inheritance, claiming legacy, and channeling ancestral power.
MORE PLACES MY WORDS LIVE
Also Published
The Weaving Is the Making
Book Chapter · Feminist Making, Doing, and Sensing · Duke University Press
An essay that understands weaving as both method and epistemology. Bringing writing, textile work, homemaking, teaching, and other creative practices into relation, it argues that feminist making and feminist knowing produce meaning together, and that living a feminist life requires weaving together forms of thought, labor, creativity, and care that we are often taught to separate.
I Is an Irrational Number
Poetry · Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora · 2022
HONORABLE MENTION · FURIOUS FLOWER POETRY PRIZE
A poem that channels an enslaved ancestor to explore what creative practice makes possible when the archive erases—or cannot fully hold—Black life. Through the written word, the poem honors an ancestor with the dignity the archive withholds while creating recognition, connection, and resolution for those of us living now.