Research Interests:
- Afrofuturism
- Ancestors
- Art and Artistic Collaborations as Vehicles for Community Healing
- Birth Work and Birth Narratives (midwifery and doulas)
- Brazil (Bahia)
- Community Healing, Grieving, and Ritual
- Creative Writing: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction;
- Egungun (Yoruba ancestral practices and masquerade)
- Literature of Africa and the African Diaspora
- Memory: Ancestral and Embodied
- Middle Passage
- Poetic Inquiry
- Religion (African-based)
- Science Fiction
- Speculative Works
- Transatlantic Slave Trade
- Thanatology
- Trauma
- Women's and Gender Studies
- Writers: Erna Brodber and Octavia Butler
- Yoruba Orisa Practices
Ultimately, I am interested in:
- How narratives can become sites for community healing.
- How the creation of and engagement with such texts helps an individual/community reinterpret relationships with the past.
- How this reinterpretation leads to new meanings of the past.
- How these new meanings lead to transformations in the daily lives of those who actively and reflexively engage the texts.
My research and creative work are grounded in contemplative practices and respectfully approach the Earth and human bodies as sites of memory, and always with the understanding that memory never dies, is subversive, and can be recovered to transform transgenerational trauma and pain into peace and power.
Research Interests:
- Trans-generational memory, trauma, and healing; the Middle Passage; thanatology; contemplative practices; Yoruba orisa and egungun (ancestral) practices; creative writing; mentoring underrepresented minority students; Brazil (Salvador and Itaparica); birth work, Black feminisms, and the arts as a vehicle for community transformation
