My next book is A Most Perilous World: The True Story of the Young Abolitionists and their Crusade Against Slavery, and will be published by Dutton Young Readers in June 2025. The book tells the story of the latest period of the abolition movement through the eyes of the four young adult children of prominent abolitionists. Set before and during the Civil War, I aim to tell a surprisingly contemporary braided coming-of-age narrative exploring questions like: what does it mean to be part of a resistance movement? what is my role in that resistance; and is the movement radical enough? 

Lucy McKim, Charlotte Forten, Lewis Douglass, and George Garrison are my main characters, and were strongly committed to the anti-slavery cause. 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. So just as important as being a part of the cause, they felt just they needed to make their own names, away from the often over-protective or disapproving shadows of the famous adults in their lives.

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. Frederick Douglass’s sons Lewis and Fred Jr. helped their father’s abolitionist cause in so many ways, yet 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.

As with Well of Souls and Flowers in the Gutter, I want to fully immerse my readers in the lives and viewpoints of these characters, and have spent countless hours reading 19th century letters and diaries from Lucy, Charlotte, Lewis, George, and their friends and family to bring their world to life in a way that readers today will connect with. 

Advance Praise

“Impeccable research and incredible details bring the stories of these four young people (two white and two Black) to life as they come of age in the years leading up to and during the Civil War. The inclusion of surprisingly relevant primary source materials will draw readers in, allowing them to connect the dots from this nation’s dark past to today and furthermore to arm themselves with information to work toward a brighter future.” —Kip Wilson, award-winning author of White Rose

Go Back and Fetch It presents the roots of African American music made accessible and playable for the first time in one place. 

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.

In early 2023, Grammy and Pulitzer winner and MacArthur Fellow Rhiannon Giddens (who also wrote the forward to Well of Souls) reached out to me about collaborating on a book that would put 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. The ultimate idea and goal is exactly what I try to do with my writing: uncover that which is hidden and lost to transform the way we think about society and culture today. She wanted the music to get back into the common repertoire, and we want the songs and the stories in this book to be what makes them have the realization that makes readers want to go deeper.

We have taken lesser-known and hard-to-access archival records and put them into treble-clef notation and banjo tablature, allowing today’s musicians to bring sounds once heard across the Americas to life. The twenty examples of Black music, created between 1687 and 1867, span from the Caribbean to North America. The patterns of tunings, melodic lines, and lyrics shed light on the impact that Black American music has had on Blackface Minstrelsy, early country, old time, and bluegrass music. They also explore the history behind each transcription so that readers can learn essential information about the history of Black American music.  

Go Back And Fetch It: Recovering Early Black Music in the Americas for Fiddle and Banjo will be published by UNC Press in the fall of 2025. 

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. 

I was thrilled to be selected as a finalist for the Baker Artist Award in 2024, and to have a chance to read and discuss my writing with the other finalists at the City Lit Festival at the Meyerhoff. 

I have also participated in literary readings in Baltimore including Writers & Words and Yellow Arrow, 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. 

Outside of Baltimore, I have been invited to lecture and speak on panels at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference (which returns to Baltimore in 2026!), the Chesapeake Writers Conference, virtually for Narratively Academy, and at West Virginia Wesleyan's Masters of Fine Arts program. I love being able to encourage other writers by showcasing their work and helping them hone their craft. 

I've currently started outlining my next narrative nonfiction book, Freedom and Bloodshed: Hope, Hatred, and Conspiracy in the Shadow of the Civil War. It follows the rise and fall of the little-known Readjuster Party in Virginia, their dream of a thriving post-Civil War South with equal rights for all and the destruction of that dream by white supremacists through political maneuvering and acts of violence. Freedom and Bloodshed also becomes both a mirror and lens for us to look at our current political climate. Again, I hope to immerse readers in the uncertain era that was the failure Reconstruction and the unfortunate rise of Jim Crow, not only to understand this story that has never been told for popular audiences before, but also as a way to consider what a revolutionary political party can do, and how we might bring about a coalition today that is not based on identity politics but making sure that all Americans are cared for and have equal rights. This project is very much at a beginning stage, and in 2025, I am focusing on finishing my book proposal, securing a publisher, and looking for additional funding sources for my research and writing.