Published Writing
Teaching My Kids to Drive While Black
There was lightning, thunder and heavy rain the recent day I accompanied my 18-year-old son and 19-year-old daughter to get their driver’s licenses in Austin, Texas. I wish I could say I thought nothing more of the passing storm. But the air felt moody and foreboding, as if it was urging my Black family to turn around, go home, lock our door and run the clock back to when my kids were little and couldn’t go anywhere without me.
My father, part of the Windrush Generation, always said he had a hankering to visit his old haunts back in England before he died. I thought it strange that Vincent Bancroft McFayden continually expressed a longing and nostalgia for his British life because 1947 to 1957 were not the best of times for him or my mother Renie, whom he’d left behind in Kingston.
Artist Kennedy Yanko on Her Solo Show in Milan
Given that she is as striking as her work is, it might be easy to fetishize, or even just relegate artist Kennedy Yanko, to one thing, to her physicality, to being female in the mostly male world of sculptors. But that would be as foolish as limiting her work to its discrete ingredients of found metal objects and paint skins.
New on Medium
Unabashedly Claiming Space
Being significantly younger than my 5 brothers and sisters while growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, I often found myself on my own looking for something to do. Among the distractions in our house, was a level in the living room bookshelf holding all 24 volumes of an entire Encyclopedia Britannica collection. My father had bought me the set from a door-to-door salesman one summer…
All You See I Owe to Pasta
The last twelve months of my life have brought tremendous celebrations. It also brought challenges, one of which was an early diagnosis of a grave health concern. As a result of that challenge, I found myself monitoring more closely than ever before every morsel of food I ate and every ounce of liquid I drank.
Friendship and Fear
I have a friend who’s in a world of hurt right now. Actually, it’s been several years of hurt. There’s a deadbeat husband who’s lied about paying their financial obligations which has resulted with their house in foreclosure. There are two daughters in private schools. The schools aren’t providing as much financial aid as she needs, as they based the aid on her and her husband’s income (which he didn’t have).