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. As a scholar-activist, I also bring the principles of community organizing and power-building to my research and teaching. 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, 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. 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. 

Presently, I am co-curator of the Born in Flames Living Archive and co-visionary of the EMBERS southern Black feminist zine series, which were launched through my work as PI of the “The Callie House Project” and “Creating the World Anew,” both funded through generous grants from the Henry Luce Foundation. I am also beginning 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 Chesapeake 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.