Recent Posts:
“There, I fixed it.”
I wanted to take another stab at this poem I wrote last spring, when I’d just met the man who became my boyfriend. “I WAS TRYING TO DESCRIBE YOU TO SOMEONE” (Inspired by a poem of the same name by Richard Brautigan) I was trying to describe you to someone and I got to talking…
On delicious forgetting, Sinners, and what we ask of the dead.
In September, one of my cousins got married. He’s (a very tanned) Puerto Rican and his wife is white. They were married on a plantation in Charleston, South Carolina, right along a river bend, beside a remodeled barn that was once central to the labor an enslaved population performed there. Huge oak trees framed the…
FAQ
Q: Who are you?
I’m an Afro-Puerto Rican writer who thinks about religion, power, race, intimacy, and what we do with language when we’re no longer trying to impress anyone. This site is a place to write in public without treating it as CV fodder.
Q: Who is this for?
Mostly me. Possibly you. Not hiring committees, not algorithms, not professional development. If you’re here looking for polish or expertise, you may be disappointed. If you’re here for language, attention, and some friction—you’re in the right place.
Q: What do you do?
I read, I write, I notice patterns, and I revise my thinking in public. Sometimes that overlaps with my professional life. Often it doesn’t. This site is where I let the overlap be messy.
Q: so, you have a question about what happened to the mammies…
Once upon a time (& by that, I mean until quite recently), this site was fronted by a banner of Black maternal figures: Black madonnas, mammies, Kara Walker’s sugar sphinx. That visual language came out of my master’s thesis and dissertation work on Black motherhood, altar-making, the visual afterlives of slavery, and how Black women are both, rendered sacred and made to carry impossible weight. They were chosen carefully and held their place here for seven years.
Those images did real work as a fixture on this blog, and I stand by their presence here. The blog has since outgrown being a container for a single academic project, and the banner no longer matched what’s happening on the page. Its removal isn’t a disavowal—just a redesign. For those curious, my master’s thesis remains available through the Digital Archive tab and I’ve written on this topic in 2023 for Catapult’s now defunct online magazine (essay linked in the Elsewhere tab). Kimberly Juanita Brown’s The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press, 2015) is still essential reading alongside both.
Q: so, you’ve found my blog & we happen to know one another…
If we know each other personally or professionally and you’ve found this blog, I beg you: let’s not talk about it. To me, announcing you’ve read my writing is like announcing you discovered that vibrating thing in my sock drawer—technically true, deeply unnecessary, maximally embarrassing. But, thanks for visiting. I hope it was worth your time!
All that being said, if you feel so inclined…
Follow My Blog
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
subvert and worship 