dreams and blueprints

I believe in plays as living, embodied blueprints for the kind of worlds I hope to build in deep community.

I am interested in poetry but not for its own sake. Poetry, cause how else we gonna speak what is and has—for a long time— been unutterable? Poetry, in search of language that may one day express deep feeling for a Black girl—Black femme, Black person transcending binaries—of no place at all.

I am an artist curious about no place at all, about being from nowhere and everywhere, about migrations, movements, prisons and grief. I am curious about how we find each other again, about the soft word she remembered from the drowned man when they dragged her from the ship: for sale. I am curious about where she hid that word and how she passed it on.

In sum, I think all my work bout home. My earliest home is Great Migration, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. I started writing plays when I was a twelve-year old Blackgirl and I fell in love with the expansiveness of this form, its ability to bring people in, to hold a room even for an instant, even for an hour, to hold our gaze, and in that holding—to ask us to imagine together. In a family made of its migrations—its diaspora, its scattered parts—what might it mean to sit with each other for an hour or two and hold some space, uninterrupted? Might it reveal a multitude of ways and means towards breathing, resting, being in full?

My body of work explores Black folks’ quests—across time—for memory, joy, freedom, survival, friendship, community, revolution, space, home, longevity, and care.