The classroom is a powerful site of transformation and community. These are the principles that ground my teaching. As a literature, performance, and Black feminist scholar, my work in the classroom and outside of that space attends most centrally to the act of contemplating the consequences of language. Toni Morrison’s notion of “word-work” informs my practice. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Morrison relays an anecdote of a blind, wise woman who indirectly instructs a group of children on the promises and dangers of language. “Word-work is sublime, she [the blind woman] thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference – the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our life.” This passage holds great meaning for me as a scholar and a teacher. The notion of word-work and its consequences underlies my work across contexts – in the acts of teaching writing, of analyzing literature, of composing and engaging in the knowledge production process. 

I offer courses on the following subjects: 

• Toni Morrison 
• Black Performance Studies 
• Introduction to Ethnic Studies 
• Reproductive Justice 
• Contemporary African American Literature 
• African Diaspora Literature 
• African American Literature Survey 
• Black Women’s Writings 
• Feminisms of Color