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. My work within the academy grows from these commitments. My interdisciplinary research agenda unfolds at the intersections of religious studies, Black studies, gender studies, critical prison studies, and public health. All of my research projects are undertaken in partnership with activists who serve as full and equal co-investigators. Together, we show how collaborative knowledge production is both the theory and the methodology 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. Both of these offerings were launched through my work as PI of two major public humanities projects, “The Callie House Project” and “Creating the World Anew,” and made possible with the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation. I am also beginning research for a new book project tentatively titled In Harm’s Way, which grows from the call to action and reckoning I traced in my 2021 essay, “Abolition is Sacred Work.” In Harm’s Way is a book of and for our current political moment. It is written amid the consolidation of federal fascism, and reckons with the eviscerating violence of now and the logics being laid bare about who is supposed to be safe and who, by extension, is supposed to be in harm’s way. Drawing on my thirty year history of HIV prison activism, I ask what we can learn from the principles of harm reduction — as drug user wisdom about so much more than drug use — to build solidarity through care and create safety that does not require someone else’s harm as its foundation.

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.