Artist Statement
Language is as confused as it is confusing and may have never been taught to walk on its hind legs—a wild thing.
My work as a poet, educator, and scholar is grounded in a commitment to both expanding and interrogating the literary canon—to carve out spaces for voices like mine that resist singular narratives of grievance, place, or feeling. My writing and teaching reside in the tension between tradition and transformation, belonging and resistance. Whether through inhabiting the canon or consciously writing around it, I aim to cultivate a space where marginalized expressions are not anomalies but necessary and generative presences in literary discourse.
My current research emerges from a constellation of thinkers—Hortense J. Spillers, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, and scholars of Black performance theory—who challenge the boundaries of genre, form, and subjectivity. I am especially interested in how Black writers and artists negotiate the unspeakable through aesthetic innovation. My scholarly manuscript-in-progress examines how contemporary poets of color use syntactic disruption, linguistic invention, and sonic fragmentation to create alternative grammars of feeling. Drawing on Spillers' concept of the "ungendered flesh," Fanon's meditations on the racialized body, Morrison's narrative reordering of time and trauma, and the performative practices of Black fugitivity, I argue that these writers remake language itself as a site of critical possibility and healing.