My professional devotion to art, literature, and Black women’s freedom was born in 2010, when I began writing creative nonfiction that explored the ways my maternal family, sister-friendships, and Black American culture, including the Southern Black Church, influenced my views of spirituality, sexuality, and Black womanhood. This personal excavation led me to research womanism, Black feminism, Black Liberation Theology, and the workings of the African Diaspora through syncretic spiritual practices, including dance.

But oh, have we learned to be a salve! For millennia and throughout the world, we have built and maintained intergenerational sisterhoods in which we teach each other, celebrate each other, mourn with each other, support one another, affirm one another. Our sisterhoods are formal and informal, internationally recognized and hidden as the pinky promises made with our best friends under a shade tree. They are our puberty rites, book clubs, all-female armies, sororities. They are hair braiding, you and four friends in the school talent show, cooking holiday dinners with mothers, grandmothers, and aunties. They are midwifery, the beauty shop, drummers leading dancers into the circle, girls trips. They usher in a spirit of unity among us and power within us. They love on us and teach us to love ourselves.

It is in this spirit that I founded The Black Womanhood (Re-)Affirmation Project, or The Black WRAP, in 2019. I envisioned a space that would center Black women’s liberation, amplify our stories, and edify and deepen our existing sisterhood and community. Driven by love of the folk, my own experience with sisterhood, and a need to share knowledge, I developed this vision into The Black WRAP: a course and workshop series that builds radical self-love in and affirms Black women, utilizing writing and creative movement work that center Black women’s experiences.

I’m a writer, dancer, and cultural curator. The art forms I practice have been powerful tools for me to explore how the political, historical, and cultural affect the personal, but you don’t have to be a professional writer and dancer—or even a good one—to gain self-knowledge. The Black WRAP’s workshops help you unearth self-knowledge by reading and applying the teaching from Black women’s texts, writing about yourself, and listening to the wisdom and truths your body holds.

Through my scholarly pursuits and publication of my creative work, I have found that my experiences of Black girlhood and Black womanhood are not unique. Collectively, we have been vilified, demonized, misread, objectified, and told we are a problem, even as we have been simultaneously erased. Too many of us have been silent about our pain, our desires, our doubts, our contradictions, our anger. Too many of us have shamed and silenced each other, having learned at early ages how to wound one another, long before we would learn to be a salve.

Starting with a conversation series in Ghana in 2026, I attached The Black WRAP’s name and logo to my cultural curation work. I love learning, finding connections and correlations between seemingly distant subjects, and curating research, books, or art to invite deeper exploration and meaning into those subjects. Whether it’s through a reading list, dinner and dialogue, cultural immersion program, educational workshop, or exhibition, my work—which is always rooted in Black women’s experiences—has gathered groups of people with diverse experiences together and built bridges towards new ways of thinking, healing, and being for all.