What I Do
My work bridges research, storytelling, and lived experience to help audiences understand what’s really happening and why it matters.
Writing & Cultural Criticism
My writing is expansive, from longform reporting to personal essays to general assignments. Publications I’ve written for include the New York Times, Vogue, Esquire, ELLE, GQ and others.
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On the Chicago GSA Prom, The New York Times
On the culture of Christmas movies, Harper’s Bazaar
On Kara Jackson, Pitchfork
On Solange’s Houston, The Guardian
On Le1f, Vice
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On Solange, The Cut
On Toni Morrison, VICE
On exploitation in art, The New York Times
On Michelle Obama, Esquire
On Laquan McDonald, Esquire
On the audacity of hope, W magazine
On Nina Simone, Pitchfork
On black athletes, Esquire
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On Jurnee Smollett, ELLE
On Chani Nicholas, Glamour
On Stacey Abrams, Rolling Stone
On Hank Willis Thomas, American Craft
On Gavin Rayna Russom, Pitchfork
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On the hair queens of Chicago, Vogue
On Solange and Houston, The Guardian
On the Chicago Period Project, Bon Appetit
On Brown Girls in Finland, Broadly
On Charlottesville, Grazia
On Brown Girls, ELLE
On queer hip hop, Esquire
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On Beyonce’s Black is King, Stereogum
On Beyonce’s Lemonade, Consequence of Sound
On Solange’s A Seat at the Table, Cosmopolitan
On Beyonce’s “Formation,“ Pitchfork
On Jlin’s Black Origami, SPIN
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I regularly contribute to many popular publications. Below are links to my archives at these outlets.
Independent Projects
I publish two newsletters exploring the culture of Christmas and the concept of healing as a lived, cultural practice.
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How do we heal? By honoring our bodies as vessels of both shadow and light. We protect them, embrace them, advocate for them, and believe in their profound capacity for transformation.
Unbodied is a newsletter that explores embodied experience in all its complexity, the tender space between youth's wild abandon and age's hard-won wisdom, where life asks us to reckon with what we carry. This is where relationships shift, careers pivot, and our mental and physical selves demand deeper attention.
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"The Christmas Cache" is a festive, themed micro newsletter (running October through December) aimed at Christmas enthusiasts, offering a blend of holiday news, movie recommendations, gift guides, and personal reflections (all with a blend of earnestness and snark). It's designed to capture the joy and excitement of the Christmas season, week by week.
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Rust Belt Chicago collects essays, fiction, and poetry from more than fifty writers who speak directly to the concerns the city shares with the region at large, and the elements that set it apart. Writing with affection, frustration, anger, and joy, the writers in this collection capture all the harmony and dissonance that define one cacophonous place.
Book Contributions
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Over the past ten years, Belt Publishing has been putting out books that prioritize the voices of the many people who live here. We’ve collected our favorite writing from our dozens of anthologies, from Pittsburgh to Gary, Chicago to St. Louis, Milwaukee to Cleveland, and more, documenting growing up in segregated St. Louis and elucidating the coded Islamophobia of southern Michigan.
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Responding to the key issues related to how marginalized communities mesh into today's culture, American Subcultures features an assortement of readings from psychologists, journalists, philosophers, sociologists, activists, and others to give you a broad understanding of this topic in order to write competently about it.