Dear Visitor,
Welcome to my website! I am a mixed-race Caribbean immigrant (African, European, and Indian ancestries) living in Canada. After moving to Tiotià:ke / Montreal, I graduated from Dawson College with a D.E.C (Diploma of Collegial Studies) in Modern Languages and Linguistics. During this period of formation, I specialized in the study of the English, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Mandarin languages. I remain invested in learning as much as I can beyond my English mother tongue.
After my brief stint at Dawson, I completed a Bachelor’s degree in Honours English Literature at Concordia University. It is at this point that I began to refine my academic interests as a Queeribbeanist, a researcher and a writer. I would continue this work of focusing on queer objects of study in my Master’s Degree. My MA thesis, “Our Openly Tigerly Life”: Natural Poetics, The Politics of Mapping, and Queer Caribbean Identity” proposed that Queer Caribbean poetry, when examined via the lens of Édouard Glissant’s conception of natural vs forced poetics, holds the potential to restructure heteronormative orderings of one’s lived experience through cartographic gestures. To this day, I continue the important work of trying to understand Queeribbean place and personhood in all of its wonderful diversity.
At present, I am pursuing PhD research at McMaster University under the guidance of Dr. Ronald Cummings, Dr. Amber Dean, and Dr. Daniel Coleman. My PhD dissertation is titled “Small-Island Intimacies: The Fluid Queeribbean Quotidian in Polymorphic Anglophone Caribbean Nation-States.” I am examining ongoing literary, sociocultural, and political conceptions &/ popular representations of the queer and the sexually fluid in Antigua and Barbuda, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. I study fluidity in Queeribbean settings for two reasons: (i) to mobilize the philosophy of a small group of writers, thinkers, and believers who intend to permanently shift conversations about the nature of Caribbean sex and sexuality away from the defunct hetero-homo divide and, (ii) to consider extensively the role that Queeribbean peoples play in the structuring of polymorphic Caribbean nation states, in order to further break open already fragile and limiting popular perceptions about island life. In doing so, my research aims to more clearly articulate how the Queer Caribbean and diaspora quotidian persists of its own accord. My PhD research was awarded Canada’s prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, and the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship in 2021. I am grateful to the government of Canada for investing in such a vital, life-sustaining project.
Beyond my immediate academic interests, I am a practicing poet and critic. My work has been published in The Puritan, Wasafiri, SX Salon, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Kola and elsewhere. I am currently finalizing my debut poetry collection entitled West of West Indian (Mawenzi House, Spring 2024), which is a timely meditation on the Queeribbean quotidian.