An open letter to white readers — For five years, I waited tables at a quirky theme restaurant in Beverly Hills. In my time there, I watched a lot of co-workers come and go but today I want to tell you about Evan. Evan was a white guy from a well-off family. Rather than live off of…

How to handle the barrage of neverending violence in our nightly news — For thirty days I slept on our green second-hand couch despite my fiancée’s pleas that I join her in our bed. Every night I fluffed the couch cushions, tucked myself in under a weighted blanket, looked out to the streetlights, and asked for a peaceful sleep. Yet every night I…

If you haven’t already, embrace your current space My wife and I live in a one-bedroom apartment in a lower-income part of town. From our complex, there are no cool bars to walk to or parks within jogging distance. In fact, our complex is so far removed from any business…

I didn’t realize I was a lesbian until I was 20 years old. At the time, I lived in Virginia and would journey up to DC every few weeks to let loose at Phase One, a lauded lesbian bar that had welcomed women like me for almost half a century…

Do it today — I have a mean case of burnout. Between work, homemaking, relationships, a side hustle, and trying to heal some deep-seated trauma, I’m kinda spent. I spent most of last week limping to the finish line for my winter break. As of 5 pm Thursday, I have eleven glorious days where…

If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re in for a wild ride — I really didn’t want to write this week’s Medium post. Normally, I get a rush looking through notebooks and scouring the internet for something to spark a new story, but this week I didn’t have that luxury. From the moment I checked my phone Monday morning, my attention was dominated…

Have you actually earned the title? — Earlier this week I came across a Twitter thread that sparked a sharp and painful gut reaction. Written by esteemed author and journalist Clint Smith III, the thread explained a racist incident Smith witnessed while in a Charlotte airport. After sharing the basics of the interaction, Smith went on to…

Please stop wasting your breath telling us about it — Unless you have been cut off from pop culture for the last twenty years, there is a good chance that you know who Beyoncé is. Former member of Destiny’s Child, master of the surprise album drop, and the highest-earning Black musical artist of all time, Beyoncé is a force to…

My grandfather died when I was two. The memories I have of him are from long after he’d died: I remember his smiling face in the portrait that hung in my grandmother’s hallway and I laugh at stories my aunts and uncles told as they reminisced over beers every summer…