UC San Diego

"Airrelle of the Maroon Witches" is a speculative upper middle-grade children’s novel in which once-enslaved people have built a network of hidden maroon communities throughout the United States, including the Southern Californian brush and the Great Dismal Swamp. A la Wakanda or Hogwarts, these maroon witches communities live isolated for their own safety, hidden from the mundane world and protective of their enchanted heritage. The story’s protagonist is Airrelle, a twelve-year-old witch-in-training who has just become old enough to leave the safety of her hidden community, discover her patron animals and tutelary plants and be initiated into the culturally-rooted magic of her people. The story’s multiple plotlines include the main character’s coming-of-age story, the increasing severity of her mother’s schizophrenia, and Airrelle’s slow first-love story with a Black girl who has grown up outside the maroon community in our own tumultuous and unenchanted world.

This project draws heavily upon the history of maroon societies and related histories of slave rebellion and fugitivity in order to explores North America as a site that produces Black culture which extrapolates from African cultures, integrates lateral cross-cultural encounters, and operates from an aporic history of displaced indigeneity that yearns for a idealized and misremembered precolonial motherland. I want my writing to reckon with these absences, to work not from appropriation or pastiche but by acknowledging the trauma of enslavement while also creating work rooted in hope, joy, and possibility.