As an abolitionist, ethnographer, organizer, and mama, I have dedicated my life to weaving liberatory futures and to building the connections that make them possible. I have been a part of the US and global movements to end AIDS and abolish prisons for more than twenty-five years, co-founding multiple projects, including TEACH Outside, Prison Health News, Project UNSHACKLE, and the Tallahassee Bail Fund. Now a leading scholar-activist in the fields of gender studies, religious studies, critical prison studies, and public health, I am Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University and Co-Founder of Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans, a Black feminist applied institute for participatory research in the South. My work centers collaborative knowledge production as both theory and method for analyzing the violences of gendered racial capitalism in our everyday lives, and for dreaming beyond what is to build together the world that must be. 

My first book, Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South (Duke University Press in 2024), is co-authored with the New Orleans-based collective, Women With A Vision (WWAV), and won the 2025 Edie Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. I am also the co-visionary and co-maker of the Born in Flames Living Archive and the EMBERS southern Black feminist zine series. My other writings and creative works, all deeply collaborative, have appeared in numerous academic venues, including Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Cultural Anthropology, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal for the Anthropology of North America, Radical History Review, and Southern Cultures, as well as public-facing outlets like Truthout and The Revealer. 

From 2022-2026, I served as co-PI for two public humanities projects, “The Callie House Project” and “Creating the World Anew,” both funded through generous grants from the Henry Luce Foundation. Currently, I am working on a new project entitled Abolition is Sacred Work, which grows from the call to action and reckoning I traced in this 2021 essay for The Immanent Frame.

I am raising my daughter along the waterways where I was born and raised. I am a builder of altars and worker of clay, both practices passed down through my maternal lineages.