Poem from Gargoyle plus five poems published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, including an older version of "Purple Lines." I've written and been published in multiple genres: fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. In teaching, I promote working across disciplines as studying poetry--fiction, rhyme, prosody, economy, etc.--can inform prose on the sentence level; studying character and scene can bring new life to poems; conducting research and examining the self be it memoir or essay lends itself to fiction and poetry.

This series of quatrains was written as a project for the DC Metro Purple Line. The original version attempted to balance commemorating historical events and repulsion for the region’s history, which was built largely by the labor of enslaved or formerly enslaved African-American people and displaced Indigenous people. “Purple” then is not only the color-coded name of the Metro line, but recalls the scars of abused Black bodies and the association with death in some Native American tribes. Still, I wanted to imbue the poem with moments of grace and hope, such as the Long Branch, Piney Branch, and Riggs Road stanzas. This version was revised in 2025.

Baltimore magazine piece (Dec 2020) describing my family's stay in a penthouse above the Lord Baltimore Hotel Triage, Respite, and Isolation Center during the summer of 2020. Below us, "hot floors" with quarantining residents and "cold floors" with medical professionals and hotel staff were part of the frontlines of Baltimore's COVID response effort. Then, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, which occurred just weeks after the fifth anniversary of Freddie Gray’s death while in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department, protesters flooded the streets around the hotel. The fuse to the powder keg that Baltimore can be seemed primed to be lit. 
 

The Baltimore Magazine essay led to a nonfiction book proposal, which is now the foundation for a novel treatment of the story set in the historic Lord Baltimore Hotel converted into a triage, respite, and isolation center during the pandemic.