adoptee voices

  • I Have a Chapbook Forthcoming!

    I am excited to announce the Spring 2025 publication of my first chapbook! Standing atop the line between fact and fiction, life and livelihood, actor and audience, Performance Anxiety interrogates the ways in which adoptees, women, and Black bodies are called upon to perform; examining love, lust, duty, and destruction in a world without a

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  • Reflections on the Foremost

    What happens when you read the foremost [white] expert on a person’s work, before reading the work itself? No person of my complexion can visit this country without being struck with the marked difference between the English and the Americans. American abolitionist, historian, and author William Wells Brown, upon arrival in Liverpool, July 1849. For

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  • Reflections on Representation

    This National Adoption Awareness Month, I reflect on what might have been, and what still could be I remember the first time I really saw myself in a book.  Tired and raw from a wet winter in the Pacific Northwest, I’d fled Seattle for the sunbaked sand of the Florida Keys where, in a white

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  • October 2023 Reading Recap

    I spent the entirety of my October reading poetry manuscripts from my fellow classmates in the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program, a year long program of intensive study that culminates in the completion of full collections by participants. It has been an inspiration and a joy to see my classmates’ work come together (and my own

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  • September 2023 Reading Recap

    I started out the month of September in Florence, Italy, where I continued to prioritize reading some amazing works in translation. Back in the U.S., I finished up the longest book I’ve read this year (maybe ever?), David Blight’s Pulitzer Prize winning, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. At a whopping 912 pages, the book is

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Women with long, curly hair seated on a stoop. She is wearing an army green jacket and jeans, smiling at the camera.