My next project (under contract with Dutton with an anticipated 2025 publishing date) is titled The Young Abolitionists: Growing Up in the Anti-Slavery Crusade. The book tells story of the latest period of the abolition movement through a group of four diverse teenagers: Lucy McKim, Charlotte Forten, Lewis Douglass, and George Garrison. Their parents and relatives--Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Robert Forten, and James Miller McKim--were some of the most active anti-slavery crusaders in the years leading up to the Civil War. During those same years, these adults were raising their teenage sons and daughters, and not just instilling in them the ideas of abolition, but making them part of the movement. 

Their parents’ radical ideas meant that these young people had radical upbringings. Boys and girls studied in the same classrooms and schools were not segregated by race. They learned it was perfectly fine to harshly criticize the government. These young people were as committed to the anti-slavery cause as their parents, and joined the army, promoted Black culture, and fought for what they believed in. 

While researching my book Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History, I came across the story of Lucy McKim, and how at 19 she joined her father in South Carolina during the Civil War. Her father helped John Brown’s widow retrieve his body from Harper’s Ferry and yet when Lucy actually saw slavery (not just self-emancipated people coming to their home as they made their way north), she wrote to her mother, “How lukewarm we have been.” That gives me chills--militant abolition was too lukewarm. She believed in the abolition of slavery, and the promotion of Black culture, and she went on to co-edit Slave Songs of the United States, the first book of Black music in U.S. history.

I love the idea that she, her friends, and other children of activists held unpopular ideas (like abolition and equal rights), and weren’t afraid to stand up for those ideas. I have been researching Frederick Douglass’s sons Lewis and Fred Jr., and how even though they, too, helped their father’s abolitionist cause in so many ways, have never been thoroughly researched or written about. Given the Black Lives Matter protests and the ridiculous attacks on history through the banning of “Critical Race Theory,” I don’t think there’s a better time for this book.

I believe in the power of narrative nonfiction to bring stories from the past to life in order to inform the world we live in today. Whether I am writing a lyric essay about landscapes and historic homes, an article on the destruction of a historic Black cemetery outside Washington, D.C., or a feature about forgotten diaries of Jewish teens before the Holocaust, that idea is at the center of all of my writing. And for me, the key with this idea is about making sure that narratives that have traditionally been marginalized, disregarded, or forgotten, are given the prominence they deserve. 

Examining these histories and writing about them for a broad audience is a tool of social justice. When we think about historic homes or cemeteries, we have to examine who built it and who it was built for. When we think about the narratives that we know from the Second World War, we have to ask why there are still stories we don’t know. I believe exploring a deep and complex history and telling the story in an engaging way can help readers understand that our built environment in the United States is a product of systemic racism or that the history we are commonly taught serves a political purpose, for example. 

I use my writing as advocacy, finding topics and subjects that are neglected and bringing them to a wider audience. I wanted to become a nonfiction writer after a cancer diagnosis at 21, and have written about the need for death with dignity, medical experimentation on Black women with breast cancer, and the inequities in health care. As a musician, I know we tell a one-sided view of American music history, and I’ve combatted that by writing about Black musicians and the African American history of the banjo. 

These pieces reflect how I use narrative nonfiction storytelling and deep research to tell important and often under-told stories. 

I am passionate about nonfiction writing in its many forms. I am curious about how we tell true stories in the absence of concrete evidence, how we craft nonfiction that propels the reader forward through a narrative, how we can bend the form to be something beyond a beginning, middle, and end. We are a genre that deserves the craft writing about how we write like it has been delivered to fiction, poetry, and even play and screenwriting. I not only think about these ideas in my own writing, I advocate for others to think about it and share their ideas as well. 

I am one of the editors of true., a bi-weekly online publication that explores the craft of nonfiction, even going beyond writing into podcast and film. In addition to interviewing authors about their books for the publication, I have invited other writers to share their diverse perspectives. I have also written about nonfiction craft for diagram and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction.

Writing--the act of sitting in front of my computer and typing--is solitary. But all the ideas that come across on the page, that is communal. Even when I am doing original archival research, as a nonfiction writer, I am building on the realities, stories, and ideas of others. During both my research and writing processes, I find myself thinking of no better analogy than Alice falling down the rabbit hole. I am alone in trying to figure out what I am writing. But then, to get out of that hole, I need the help of others. That is why I love writing communities, and am proud to be part of a writing community here in Baltimore. 

Before the pandemic, I participated in literary readings in Baltimore including Writers & Words and Yellow Arrow. I also hosted panels at the CityLit festival and invited readers at events including Notes on Notes about the intersection of writing and music at Atomic Books. I also write for Baltimore Fishbowl’s Baltimore Writer’s Club and feature local authors. My introduction to much of this work was thanks to a 2018 Rubys Artist Award from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, which supported my research for Well of Souls. 

I regularly interview other local authors to promote their books on Baltimore Fishbowl or at events. I love being able to support other writers and pay forward the support that I have received from the community. 

During the pandemic I’ve found surprising inspiration and support in an intimate creative community of four nonfiction writers who gather on Zoom to discuss the craft of writing. We wouldn’t have ever been able to meet in person, and our diversity (in everything from age to sub-genre of nonfiction), has expanded the types of nonfiction I read. Our discussions and readings have inspired new essays and new ways of thinking about my writing. But most importantly, I have been able to support the others through advice and connections. 

For musicians who play folk and traditional music, they often talk about the moment. For people born in the late 1940s and 1950s, it’s when they bought Pete Seeger’s “How to Play the 5-String Banjo” or when they got their hands on the three-album “Anthology of American Folk Music” put together by Harry Smith or when they picked up the New Lost City Ramblers Old Time String Band Songbook. This moment, this thing, opened up a whole new world for them, and they became entranced by early country, string band, old time, and folk music. They learned those tunes and more, and learned the history of the music, the stories behind the music. They embraced American music, or what they thought American music to be. For people born since the 1990s, especially Black musicians, seeing the Carolina Chocolate Drops was their moment. “They’re telling history, they are talking about this,” Hannah Mayree, founder of the Black Banjo Reclamation Project, remembered thinking when they first heard the band. “Once I heard about them, I was like ‘It [the banjo] is a Black instrument.’” It made them want to explore this music more deeply.

Co-authored with Grammy Award-Winning Artist and MacArthur “Genius” Rhiannon Giddens, our Early Black Music Book will be that moment for people today. This book puts early Black Atlantic music in the hands of professionals and amateurs, so that they don’t have to be highly musically literate or scholars in order to play and learn about this music, and the music then gets back into the common repertoire. We want the songs and the stories in this book to be what makes them have the realization that makes them want to go deeper. Then, whether they’ve had that moment with our book or are already on the path, we want to give them more substance so that they are not just learning a tune or song, but they are ingesting the tune and embodying the history. We want to provide people with a resource that exists nowhere else. We want the sounds that were once heard across the Americas, from Suriname through the Caribbean, to the southern United States and as far north as New York to become part of the musical canon of American music once again.

The book, under contract with UNC Press, will be interdisciplinary, with twenty treble-clef and banjo tab transcriptions of tunes of early Black Atlantic music from 1687 through the 1840s, and lyrics for four untranscribed songs. The tunes come from twelve different sources and originate in Jamaica, Suriname, Haiti/ St. Domingue, Barbados, St. Bartholomew, New York, and Ohio. The lyrics come from four different sources and originate in St. Kitt’s, North Carolina, New York, and Virginia.