Although much of my book tour for Flowers in the Gutter was cancelled due to COVID-19 lockdowns, I made this zine of Songs of the Edelweiss Pirates for people to download and print themselves and to give out for free at events. Being a musician, one of the things that appealed to me about the Pirates was how they used music as resistance. I thought that some of their songs should live on as protest music today, so I translated and notated them. I also thought the copy-paste/ black-and-white aesthetics of the zine fit with the proto-punk ethos of the Pirates. 

While almost all of my events for Flowers in the Gutter were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was able to do remote events, including this bonus video for the Gaithersburg, Maryland Book Festival. I give a brief overview of the Edelweiss Pirates and share some images from the book. 

The cover of Flowers in the Gutter, which features an illustration of an Edelweiss Pirate running away after punching a Nazis. They're on the bridge in Cologne, with the famous Kolner Dom Cathedral in the background and bombers flying overhead. 

The Spanish cover of Flowers in the Gutter, done by artist Diego Mallo. 

My books rely heavily research in both primary and secondary sources. I want readers to feel, hear, and see what my characters did; I want to immerse readers in the world that my characters inhabited. For Flowers in the Gutter, I visited the archive at the El-De Haus, which is now the Nazi Documentation Center in Cologne (pictured here). I also visited the regional archive of Nordrhein Westfalen, which holds the Gestapo archive, including the original arrest records, interrogation reports, and internal memos relating to the Edelweiss Pirates. It was both exciting and harrowing to hold the documents that were in the room with the Pirates. 

During my research for Flowers in the Gutter, I traveled to Cologne. Equally important to visiting archives for me was going to the places that the Edelweiss Pirates had been, whether in the city or in the country on one of their many hikes. They loved to escape the city and go camping, and would have been on the same trail I'm on here in the Siebengebirge (Seven Mountains) south of the city. 

Me, holding up an advance copy of Flowers in the Gutter in front of a mural in Cologne, Germany for the Edelweiss Pirates. This was during the memorial event for the murder of Edelweiss Pirates and Kristallnacht in 2019. While some people in Cologne (especially the Anti-Fascist League) are very familiar with the Edelweiss Pirates and keep their memory alive, many others are not.

At the book launch for Flowers in the Gutter with my mom, who as a former German professor helped me do research in Germany. I was lucky enough to be able to host the event at Atomic Books in Hampden, Baltimore, where the owners support many local authors. 

In 2020, Brendan O'Meara of the CNF Podcast interviewed me about Flowers in the Gutter and my research and writing process. 

The cover of Well of Souls features the Haitian Banza, as it is dubbed. Made by a person of African descent in Haiti, the instrument has a gourd body, a head made of skin, and a neck made of wood. It may not look like a modern banjo, but it has all of the elements that make a banjo, a banjo. 

Since the publication of my book, the Musee de la Musique in France, which owns the Banza, has increased their interest in the instrument, and even did carbon-date testing in 2024. They discovered that (as I supposed in the book), the instrument dates to before the Haitian Revolution. 

One of the most exciting parts of publishing Well of Souls is sharing this important history with readers. In October 2022, I was invited to the Pratt Library Central Branch to be in conversation with musician and scholar Jake Blount about my book. My book tour has taken me beyond Maryland to Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, New York, and Rhode Island. 

In October 2022, I was invited to the Enoch Pratt Free Library's Writers Live! series to discuss my book with musician and scholar Jake Blount. Charlottesville musician Seth Swingle and Baltimore musician Brad Kolodner started us off with some music. 

My writing relies heavily on primary source materials to create a narrative that immerses the reader in the world of my characters with cultural and social history that connects the past and present. In early 2019, I was able to do research at the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota thanks to a research fellowship. Much of my work is not possible without these hard-to-come-by opportunities. At the library, I was able to spend time with the papers of John Gabriel Stedman, who collected what is now the world's oldest banjo, and many antiquarian books related to early Atlantic music. 

In 2019, I was also able to visit Amsterdam to view the Creole Bania banjo as part of the "Afterlives of Slavery" exhibit at the Tropenmuseum and the dioramas of Gerrit Schouten that started my writing of Well of Souls. In Amsterdam, I was also able to connect with two Afro-Surinamese musicians who are trying to revive the music the banjo was once central to, much like US musicians including Jake Blount and Rhiannon Giddens are trying to do here. While my writing is heavily informed by research, I write in a narrative style that centers readers in place and the emotions of characters, while still keeping a grounding that explores larger themes of what our society is experiencing today. 

As part of the Rubys Artist Award, I was also able to travel to New Orleans, where Black music and the banjo has played a central role in shaping the sound of the city. I was able to meeting Sylvester Francis, who founded the Backstreet Cultural Museum to preserve traditions in the city and view the Mardi Gras Indians parading on St. Joseph's Night. Part of what I want to do with this book and research is connect people and places across the Americas to find commonalities between out shared culture.

I was invited on the Jack Dappa Blues Radio program to talk more about Well of Souls and the role the early banjo played in Black music, spirituality, religion, and resistance. 

In 2018, I received the Rubys Artist Award from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation to support the research and writing of Well of Souls. I was thrilled for the recognition and funding that supported the book.