Grubbies

About Magenta

I am a creative nonfiction writer and teaching artist who uses storytelling as a portal to enter realities that transcend our current one. My art is curious about shapeshifting, Black diasporic myths, music, love, horror, afrosurrealism and the elasticity of Black femme and nonbinary embodiment. My writing, ranging from interviews, features, poems and essays, is in Plentitudes, Teen Vogue, The Iowa Review, Carve Magazine, Catapult, Allure, OkayAfrica and more places. I am composing my first book: a collection of essays, poems and portraits unlocking the mysteries of the Black femme womb, generational healing and the power of liquid realms as spiritual portals. It is a hybrid, speculative and experimental collection explored through the realms of possession, fantasy and West African mythology. This manuscript articulates my journey of self possession, queerness, ancestral spirituality and otherworldly lessons. As a teaching artist, I facilitate workshops that collide creativity, education and empowerment: environments where Black queer imagination and expression is uplifted. I have facilitated over a dozen writing workshops series, ranging from afrofuturism, myth making and horror, to experimental essay and poetry writing classes. With my eclectic creative writing workshops exploring craft, hybrid genres and remixing form, I challenge writers to bend their pen and pages to their will. At New York Writers Coalition (2019-2024), I developed workshops for Black femme, nonbinary, queer and gender expansive writers to explore their imaginations and expressions from unique angles. The writers practiced across a spectrum of the arts: from actors and dancers to playwrights and spoken word artists. Through my curriculum, I guided them with curated syllabi and original writing prompts to generate innovative works of art. The success and popularity of my classes inspired NYWC to implement a curriculum for facilitators to hold a multitude of workshops catered to Black virtual and NYC communities, called The Black Writers Program. My work with NYWC also ignited a collaboration with myself and The Free Black Women’s Library (TFBWL). In November 2023, I held a workshop series on themes of embodiment, shapeshifting and possession, for Black femme writers at the library, which concluded with a live reading celebrating the amazing stories the writers dreamed into.