|writer

artist | scholar | teacher | director | writer | actor | martial arts instructor | consultant | links | blog | contact me | home

I enter the dining hall. I grab a tray, slide it along the sideways-prison-bars-looking shelf rack, then shovel a forkful of eggs and some dried, cubed potatoes onto a dull, pale blue plastic dish …[T]he dishwasher heat steam[s] around the edges of the tray. But I am struck cold, and all the heat in the world can’t [warm]…my hands.…I sit alone — like new arrivals in the prison movies — an outcast.

  • From Jasmine, a Novel-in-progress

[T]hat word, “echo”. … “Echoes of the past,” as Sweet Honey in the Rock sings, are hard to come by in a culture where “history” can be Googled, without reflection, without reverberation. Point, click. Nothing completely wrong with that, as long as we know the difference between the gadget and the genuine article…

  • From Ghosting, a play in two acts

Pray the Devil Back to Hell … was made in a climate that has promoted the notion of "post-racialism." … In such a climate, new manifestations of colonialism can occur, obfuscating the ways in which particular triumphs, such as that of the [Liberian] women in this documentary, can be mistaken for paradigmatic shifts in power relations…

[My work] … attempt[s] to diagnose the expanse of the project of annihilative absenting that constitutes the temporal plot-points from which the non-black world draws its inspiration (read: life-breath). In so doing, I aim to reveal the ways in which [black playwrights] cognize how the black’s predicament exceeds the very linearity that has claimed to shackle her/him/them.

  • From Solving for X: The Allegorhythms of Black Feminist Playwriting, a forthcoming monograph