Exploring the history and landscape of dispossession in the lives of Black and Brown People of Color.
A few months ago I had the good fortune to hear Rachel Cohen reading from her recently republished A Chance Meeting. Rachel had been one of my professors for my MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. In taking the opportunity to greet her after the reading and she mentioned the first long-form essay published in Callaloo Literary Journal in 2007 — Lonesome Refugees.
Are there TV shows you watch for no apparent good reason? I have an inexplicable affection for home repair shows. The advent of streaming services brought Welcome Home, based in Waco TX, to my screen (until I realized how homophobic and scarily right wing the show’s owners are) and then a whole raft of HGTV based programming featuring builders and renovators in Chicago, Indianapolis, Southern California, Atlanta, Mississippi.
As a grassroots community organizer I have worked on housing, food security, Black worker rights and immigration issues while organizing with women of color from many different countries. The urban environment is where I live and engage these organizing efforts. Since Hurricane Katrina I dedicated much of her writing, advocacy and organizing to exploring the environmental degradation suffered by working class and communities of color in the wake of plastics production and the industrial toxins those industries create. The cancer alleys and Superfund or Superfund adjacent sites of the US south are especially a focus of my efforts. You can follow my writing and advocacy efforts on Medium and soon on Substack
Let’s get in touch to discuss a project, yours or mine.
