I am happy to announce that I was recently awarded The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for 2023. Of course, I am humbled and elated by this news and the foundation’s decision to allow me to continue thinking, reflecting, and writing about the beauty in this world. The novelist Annie Ernaux once wrote Mémoire de fille, “I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.” As a person from the working class who believes deeply in the power of the oppressed to dream, philosophize, and create, I hope to narrate the intimate lives and kinship structures of a diaspora whose dignity, family, and survival were often compromised. I highly recommend reading about the other notable awardees on the Andy Warhol Foundation Website and the announcement in Artforum.

With support from the foundation, I will write a series of essays animating the reproductive lives of people of African descent as portrayed by contemporary Black feminist artists, filmmakers, and sages. My writing will generate connections between the history of science and the aesthetics of the Black womb, reflecting on how the African diaspora has exercised agency through pregnancy termination. It will also conjure the rapturous texture of childlessness and infertility among those who develop alternative models to kin, including queer communities. If you know of any Black artists, filmmakers, and sages producing new exhibitions, films, or performances along these subjects, please share their upcoming events with me.