Sun sign: Cancer
Birthplace: Gainesville, Florida

I was raised in Central Florida, specifically Alachua and Marion County. My maternal grandmother was my primary caretaker during the first five or six years of my life. I spent the weekends and summers with my mother and four brothers and sisters across town in a housing project called Woodlawn Park. We made frequent trips to the family “home base,” Brunswick, Georgia where my great-grandparents and many other relatives lived. Any mention of Brunswick automatically triggers an aural memory of Brunswick’s distinct aroma, that of a pulp mill. If you have ever been there, you know what I’m talking about.

I also have relatives in the tiny town of Darien, Georgia (subject of a scene in the movie Glory), the nearby Golden Isles and Savannah. My maternal great-grandparents are buried in the black cemetary in Darien. My great-great-grandmother, Clifford Trimings was a well-known woman in Glynn County, Carneghan and Cumberland Island, Georgia. She owned land on Cumberland there that is now owned by the U.S. government. However, there is a little church on the island, the First African Baptist Church, that was founded in 1893 that has her father’s name, Charlie and uncle Philip, on the cornerstone.

The cornerstone of the First African Baptist Church,
Cumberland Island, Georgia

It was in that teeny little church where John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette tied the knot. That was a weird item for me to read in the news especially as an image of the church graces the walls of all of my relatives in Brunswick. To use the church, you have to make a reservation with the National Park Service! I visited the church two summers ago when I spent a week on Cumberland Island.

Me sitting on the church steps

I rode a bike from the south end of the island to get to the church. It was in an area that was a settlement of blacks and where my grandmother used to run around during the summers of her childhood. It was weird, because I could actually feel and envision her running through the trees and playing games with her sisters and brothers. There are no black folk left on Cumberland. My distant cousins left in the 1980s. I did the return trip back to the south tip near Dungeness where the Carnegies lived, riding the bike on the beach. It was a long, arduous ride but beautiful and well worth it.

Our bikes on the beach. That ride back to
the other end of the island was hard!

My grandmother along with her siblings traveled the 41 miles by boat every summer to Cumberland Island to stay with their grandmother. Clifford shunned the title grandmother, hence everyone called her “Sister” (which is also what my grandmother is called by her siblings). She spoke with a thick Geechee accent that sounds very similar to the accent of blacks in the West Indies. Nowadays, when I’m in Brunswick, everyone chuckles when we talk about folks who still speak that “geecheetalk.”

My relatives from Savannah (hello William and Arnetta!) tell me that they would visit Atlanta as youngsters, where I lived for two years, but looked down on the city folk there as being unsophisticated. Apparently Savannah was the “classy” place for black folk back then. Some of those relatives now live in Atlanta.

My childhood memories are those of a rusty butt, nappy-headed girl in a tropical climate surrounded by a large but very close-knit and insular family. We spent a lot of time in church, the Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church in Gainesville, Florida on 8th Avenue. My mother was the church pianist and my grandmother the church treasurer. We were on the road a lot, traveling back and forth from Georgia (and east Texas) visiting family or attending churches where my mother was the guest musician. My sister and I would often join her at the piano to sing. Our trio performed at numerous tiny churches in the backwoods of Florida. I realize now as an adult that because of my mother’s musicianship, I know hundreds of “old timey” gospel and spiritual songs.

I left my cocoon after high school to attend college in western Massachusetts, worlds away from my “down home” country girl environment. I graduated from Smith College in the early 1990s with a degree in philosophy and a minor in economics. I ended up in Washington, D.C. soon after and worked as a news reporter for the Washington Blade newspaper and then as the D.C. correspondent for the Los Angeles-based Advocate magazine. I fled D.C. after a few years, feeling stifled creatively and headed out west to San Francisco. That was two years of creative (and sometimes productive) slackdom running around with friends all in varying stages of X and crystal-meth induced madness (I didn’t do the hard drugs but I lived life in the fast lane frequently with a cocktail in hand. There were many times during the wee hours of the morning in big dance clubs of the SOMA district that I’d look up from my frenzied dancing to house music and realize that I was the only person not on X or some other chemical. Strange.). Memories of living there are foggy and clouded. After a near-death incident, I realized that I should probably move from the Bay Area if I didn’t want to hang out in cafés and after-hours clubs the rest of my life, wasting away brain cells and accomplishing nothing.

I high-tailed it to New York City where I ended up as the Chief of Research at the Village Voice. While in New York, I jump started a freelance writing career, even writing a little for the Voice’s Cyber column (renamed later on “Machine Age” and then dumped altogether). I left the Voice to go on a sabbatical and ended up not returning and moved west yet again via a six-month sojourn to Texas ending up in Seattle where I continued to freelance. I also picked up gigs as a contractor in the tech industry. When I realized that all of my friends were leaving Seattle to return the East Coast or headed to Silicon Valley, I left as well and found myself in Chicago. I stayed in the Windy City for four years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I graduated from college in the early 90s. Realizing that I’d better get a move on in making my intention of attending graduate school a reality, I applied to an interdisclipinary graduate  program at Dartmouth in 2003.

I started school during the summer of ’03 and graced the streets of Hanover, New Hampshire (and Stack Level 5 of Baker-Berry Library) for six months before moving to Boston. That lasted for about 1.5 years and then I left New England. Traveled a bit and hung out in Gainesville, Florida and shacked up in a tiny space in Darien, Georgia to chill for a second and enjoy the natural beauty of coastal Georgia, the landscape of my ancestors. I lived in Atlanta for two years, spent the summer of ’07 in Montréal, Québec and I now reside in Austin, Texas. I’m often on the road

I am also a founding member (along with kt shorb and Ana-Maurine Lara) of Stamp Lab, an award-winning performance group. In 2008,  we won the Theatre Prize in the Artspark festival sponsored by the HBMG Foundation for our original multimedia play, HUSH. We created another multidisciplinary short play called T.A.G. which  premiered at Austin’s FronteraFest in January 2009. The play won “Best of Week” and “Best of Fest” and was reviewed by the Austin Chronicle. It was also in a showcase of several original shorts last March called Edge Walkers.

I am also currently working on a second novel and polishing up a collection of short stories.  If you want to contact me, use the contact page. I’ve cleaned the site of email addresses due to evil spammers.