About Me

Out of Many, One People. This is the motto Jamaica adopted the same year my father was born in Kingston. It's also the phrase that encompasses my experience as a multiracial, US-born daughter of the Caribbean Diaspora. My parents raised my younger brother and me--setting aside a handful of years as an active duty US Air Force family--in the same rural-but-growing county in Virginia where my mother grew up. All at once, I sipped sweet tea, savored the Scotch Bonnet's heat, crooned Conway Twitty songs with my maternal grandfather, jammed to Shaggy with my own West Indian father, played at the local park with similarly-hued kids who spoke Spanish, attended school with kids who spoke English and shared few of my own physical characteristics. In each context, I felt the sharp, visceral crisscross of each intersectionality.

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Creative practices like writing and modeling illuminate my identities. I bring a multitude of experiences to each entry I pen and every photoshoot I pose for. There's a sort of healing that occurs when we knit disparate experiences together to make whole something previously discordant.

 

I, like Jamaica, come from many things, and all of those things make Me. Out of many, I, too, am One.