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About Me

To know me, you must know where I come from. Collaged here is my grandmother, a retired Kindergarten world-maker who graduated from the one-room school her very own grandmother ran—a school where black girls learned of their power. I am first a relative—a daughter, a sister, a niece, an auntie—and next, I am a fourth-generation educator and learner.

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Pictured here is my mother and father. I am the product of a once-illegal love—the inheritor of worlds and ways of being that shape my every step. My mother was the first in her family to graduate from college and leave her German village to teach in America. Her mother survived WWII bombings and was her family’s first to leave the farm and get a job tending the elderly. My father’s mother, and her mother before her, and her mother before her were all Black elementary school teachers in deep Mississippi. He takes up this legacy by advocating for those who are discarded by our systems. 

Because of them,

I am a:

  • Collagist

    Since my childhood, magazines, scissors and a glue stick have been my medium for creation. Now, I get to practice wellness, time travel, honor loved ones, write fantasy, and create commissioned pieces. I work in collaboration with other artists and educators to design art and educational materials.

  • Doctoral Candidate

    I am writing my dissertation at the University of Michigan's Joint Program in English and Education. My current work explores both the materiality of colonial technologies in schools and the capaciousness of Black and Native carework. Specifically, I collage together Black and Native teachers’ theorization of our experiences navigating our own schooling as well as their teaching with autoethnography, history, Geography Studies, Black Studies, Native Studies, Black Feminisms, and Political Theory. I am the recipient of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Rackham Merit Fellowship, Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship, Rackham Dissertation Fellowship, Arts & Resistance at the University of Michigan Fellowship, and Institute for the Humanities Fellowship.

  • Coach & Facilitator

    After teaching and witnessing the teachers in my life, I wanted to nurture the aliveness in other educators, so I became an instructional coach and facilitator for teachers, instructional coaches, and non-profit leaders. Now, I specialize in creating caring communities, combatting anti-Blackness, Native erasure, and white supremacy within self/classrooms/organizations, as well as facilitate liberatory strategic planning.

  • Non-profit Leadership

    I am a former manager at a Fortune 500 company, and while there, I had the honor of managing a team of instructional coaches committed to reflection, self-determination, and decolonization. Non-profit work is grueling and easily co-opted. I continue to coach non-profit team leaders in their pursuits of alignment, integrity, sustainability, and justice.

  • K-12 educator

    Upon graduating college, I found healing and fury teaching the Bronx’s best sixth-graders. I taught all subjects and received my Master’s in Childhood Education. I research teacher retention and serve on the board of Profound Ladies, a non-profit aimed at recruiting and retaining BIPOC women teachers.