SweetBaby’s Demi-Adventures is a cross-genre collection of short stories and screenplays that follow a precious young boy who is navigating life as a first generation American.

The protagonist of this novel, Cornelia, a serial killer, operates by the code of killing people who tortures animals. In a way, this type of reasoning settles her, the killer, as an evil character but with apparent ethical intentions. The protagonist remains voiceless in the whole book.

In this manuscript, I orient my family’s origins after two historical events: the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in Mexico in 1519, and, the start of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 1526. These events sparked the creation of two culturally distinct spiritual traditions which arose in the unique social, geographic, and political contexts of their respective countries; Hoodoo in the Black-American South, and Curanderismo in Mexico. The writing in this project explores how these distinct cultural traditions continue to inform the everyday lived experiences of the descendants of these respective peoples. Two isms are foundational to my approach in writing about history, closed spiritual traditions, and gaps in personal and collective memory: 1) an understanding of time as circular, not linear, and 2) an understanding of history as an ongoing process. Contending with gaps in the historical and familial record and archive, this project situates the personal and lived experiences of a mixed race Black and Mexican-American woman and my family within the broader historical contexts which brought my lineages together. Through exploring topics central to the tenets of the spiritual traditions I practice, such as love, ancestral veneration, and spiritual rituals, I highlight the tensions between Western understandings and logics, and the knowledges of the historically oppressed and dispossessed, particularly in relation to understandings of time, medicine, healing, and family.

A book-length braided essay-like collection of poetry and nonfiction pieces addressing the author’s coming out experience as a gay man living in Mexico and then crossing into the United States. It offers a review of the moments in the life of the lyrical voice growing up as a gay middle class Mexican man who at an early age was required to learn English as a second language. It is a story about family and community relationships examined under the scope of sexuality, class, and nationality. The narrative is enabling a comparison between the authors romantic life while living in Mexico as opposed to the experience of sexuality in the United States. Furthermore, it is a mapping of a community from the year of coming of age and what it meant to come out during the decade of the nineties in a third world country such as Mexico. The braided essay structure responds to he need to intermingle these experiences of the world; it is an attempt to describe how different parts of the concept of identity come are suddenly bound through these stories and poems under the same book-length collection. As the author’s awareness shifts focus by crossing the border between the United States and Mexico, in the post-NAFTA, post-911 era. The text offers a reflection on how the power dynamics of culture, globalization, and social justice intersect and affect queer bodies of color in a transnational landscape.

Myles Crescendo, a jazz bassist and high school student in Detroit, is always running—to class, to band rehearsal, to public transit. When Myles’s father, the director of the school’s highly successful music program, suddenly dies at the start of their senior year, they ride the sonic waves from their father’s record player to search for him in the stars. Myles’s epic pilgrimage leads them to learn their African diasporic musical heritage, dialogue with deities, liberate a celestial lover from purgatory, prepare for their Southern grandmother’s imminent death, and perform their senior recital. Jazz, journey & cosmology collide in The Book of Myles. Had they ever been asunder?

Understanding Charlie Beal is the result of a digital archive project focusing on Charlie Beal, a Black jazz pianist of the 20th century who has since faded into obscurity. In Understanding Charlie Beal, I attempt to challenge the idea of "the Archive" by utilizing it as a genre to frame a sprawling hybrid text. Utilizing Saidiya Hartman's theory of "critical fabulation" I seek to write from a place of not what happened, but what could have happened. To accomplish this, I work from the primary source material of my family records that my paternal grandmother, Nona, kept, and which my father, in his young adulthood, damaged. Through the use of photo albums, interviews, and the single record he was able to record in his lifetime, I ask myself and my family not just who Charlie Beal was, but who he and his memory are able to be to us now. In short, Understanding Charlie Beal has actually been my attempt to understand my family through the occasion of seeking out this mysterious and larger-than-life figure that left such a large emptiness in his death. In this process, my work has had to contend with the themes of familial legacies and obligations, intergenerational trauma, the continued history of slavery, the burdens and blessings of memory, and the fluid boundaries between life and death.