THINKING

My research’s success to date has been realized through working side-by-side diverse community activists, archivists, and professors. It prepares me for my research by equally resourcing my own political positionality and scholarly opportunities. My strong publishing history in popular media outlets and my work’s community-engaged research component dissolves the inside/outside binary of the university often drawn along racial and class lines. In sum, my work sets forth a new approach to African American literature and how Black women’s reproductive lives alter and convene new forms of historicity. My spherical scholarship— literary, visual, digital, and material—offers a teaching and research agenda that would not just benefit me but create opportunities for Howard students to carve out their own meanings of scholarship and strengthen their emerging expertise in African American Literature. As a community we can together actualize a radical futurity where Black kids are raised without fear and their mothers survive a history of filial estrangement and archival denial.

New projects include:

Untitled Project on Black women’s reproductive lives, digital and tech surveillance, and surgery and procedure: A critical look at oppressive technologies which intervene on Black women’s everyday lives in the birth room and beyond. For a sneak peak at this work, take a look at my co-written op-ed for Truthout.org on the use of advanced technological surveillance disguised as “care” in prisons and beyond. This project also takes particular focus on reproductive procedure within one’s reproductive journey, and urges us to think broadly about “data” and information in the age of institutional and cultural concern toward Black maternal and infant mortality. It troubles the long history to medical testimony by Black women patients undergoing reproductive surgeries such as hysterectomies, cesarean sections, and fibroid removal to re-organize the sexual and racial economies of information related to pain, tragedy, and consent in the surgical space.

Writing

Upcoming publications (Updated January 2023): Social Science Research Center’s Just Tech Blog

Public Media: I publish in an array of public-facing outlets, including ReWire News, Sugarcane Magazine, Truthout.org, AfroPunk, The Root, bitch Magazine, and The Feminist Wire.

Academic Articles: My academic essays can be found in interdisciplinary journals and book compilations such as American Quarterly, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Society, and Culture, Hastings Report on Bioethics, National Political Science Review, Frontiers, and The Black Scholar.

Academic Monographs: I’m currently finalizing my first monograph, To Learn to Let Them Go: Maternal Dispossession and the Creative Revivals of Black Motherhood is under contract with Ohio State University Press and will published in 2025. This book creates new methodologies to investigate contemporary formations of Black maternal dispossession within the confines of radical documentation and archiving. My second manuscript, Reproductive Literatures: Black Women and the Sexual Politics of Procedure (forthcoming) is a cultural and technological history of Black women’s relationships to reproductive procedures such as hysterectomies, abortion, and other reproductive surgeries. It interrogates Black women’s first-hand experiences with surgery and the history of the field through the work of performance artist Doreen Garner, and poets Krista Franklin and Bettina Judd, to investigate the racial and sexual politics of going “under the knife” as a Black woman in America.

Creative Work: SALT: Contemporary Art + Feminism, The HAUNT Journal of Art, and I have an autobiographical book chapter that will be published by Demeter Press in 2022.

Speaking

Academic Conferences: I regularly speak at academic conferences such as the National Women’s Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, the Northeast Modern Language Association, and many more.

Invited Talks

Colleges and Universities: Pomona College, University of California, Merced; Penn State University, Yale University Summer Bioethics Institute

Arts and Culture Centers: Jane and Littleton Mitchell Center for African American Heritage Center, Newark, DE; The White Building, London, England

Associations

Keynote Speaker: Race & Culture/Ethnicity Affinity Group of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH) (Canceled)

Media

Black Agenda Report Radio with Glen Ford: Interview on the shackling of Black Mothers in Prison (Air date TBD)