She is a literary and art critic specializing in Black contemporary horror and science fiction. Her research questions and reading methods are rooted in Black studies; she addresses philosophical concerns of alternative epistemology, ontology, and world-building.
Her art practice spans across printmaking, acrylic painting, and digital illustration/collage. Her goal is to experiment, playing with color, texture, and otherworldly representations.
I received my PhD in English from the University of Washington, my MA in English from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and my BA in English from Tennessee State University.
My research engages Black speculative creative practices and their responses to alternative ways of being, knowing, and world-building that center Black life and thought.
My dissertation, which I'm reworking into my first book project, Imagine Another World: A Philosophical Approach to Black Speculative Arts and Literature, examines contemporary Black American science fiction, surreal, and horror novels, films, and visual arts. My arguments and analyses engage Black methods of finding authentic life, love, kinship, and care. I also engage queer theories’ experiments with reality, relationality, and time. Both fields articulate the need to develop new modes of seeing imagination as a valid mode of knowing.
Each of my chapters engages concepts of opacity, revenge, affect, unknowability, and the possibilities that otherworldly expressions offer. For example, one chapter argues that suspicion in Black horror challenges traditional epistemology and demonstrates knowing through the senses but not through objective facts. Another chapter advocates for the didactic worldbuilding potential in Black feminist horror through Bree Newsome’s Wake (2010), Wangechi Mutu’s All the Way Up, All the Way Out (2012), and Nnedi Okorafor’s “Dark Home” (2023).
As a curator, project coordinator, and arts writer, I embody queer sensibility. I challenge traditional exhibitions and writing standards. Through experimentation, I break institutional barriers. When I analyze an artwork, I note the textures, colors, and materials and articulate how these qualities impact my mood and thoughts. I prioritize art shows that offer embodied and ecstatic experiences that engage multiple senses.
My scholarship also influences my visual arts practices. I am a printmaker and digital illustration artist. To explore alternative world building, I create works where I manipulate and distort human and animal bodies, making bricolage beings. And I play with color and texture to make abstract shapes and patterns. I offer visual stories of how I conceptualize another realm for myself.
With all of my projects I ask: How is this work, or how can I be, curious about alternative ways of being and knowing? And how can this alternative life be sustained in another world? Because of these alternative ways of living, what is made possible/what can be found in this other world that is not possible/not found in our current reality?
