Like many relationships that form in adulthood, ours began through proximity: kids’ birthday parties, our annual Friendsgivings, and playdates. His youngest children and my stepdaughter are close in age, so there were afternoons spent watching the kids play while we talked around them. Over time, David became less “my husband’s friend” and more a friendly presence in my own life.

I knew he was a poet. His collection Post Traumatic Hood Disorder had been selected for Yahdon’s Literary Swag Book Club some years prior, so I’d encountered his work before I ever really encountered him.

I also knew him as someone who cared deeply about music. We debated Prince and Michael Jackson frequently. Beyoncé inevitably found her way into the conversation **insert eye roll here**. He had strong opinions, delivered with conviction but softened by sly humor. I’ve known him as thoughtful, stylish, and the kind of person who seemed to have always been himself, someone whose tastes, ideas, and presence were fully formed.

Or so I thought.

It’s easy to mistake coherence for inevitability. We meet people as the most current version in their stories. We inherit what’s there: the poet, the professor, the father, the friend, the person with an expansive sneaker collection and a clear point of view. We rarely stop to ask what shaped that version, or how it came to be.

This conversation presented me with an opportunity to do exactly that.

I realized I knew a bit about David’s life, but not the architecture beneath it.

What emerged over the next hour wasn’t a story about becoming a poet. It was a story about learning to see, through neighborhood, language, music, performance, basketball, gang culture, discipline, and, eventually, poetry. By the end of our conversation, poetry no longer felt like the beginning of David’s story. It felt like the place where everything that came before finally found its form.

What taught you how to see?

David is from Southeast San Diego, where he grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood as the son of a Mexican father and a white mother. During the 1970s and ‘80s, decades of redlining and housing discrimination concentrated Black, Latino, and Filipino families in Southeast San Diego, creating a cultural landscape that shaped generations of young people, including David. At home, his parents filled the house with the sounds of Motown, namely Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson. His grandfather had his own soundtrack: drunken nights underscored by Mexican music that David remembers hearing but never fully claiming as his own. Outside, hip-hop became another classroom. “My first tape was Raising Hell,” he told me, smiling as he remembered it was a gift from a girl trying to flirt with him.

That memory belongs to a particular time, one before algorithms and unlimited streaming. Music wasn’t immediately available. You borrowed cassette tapes. You waited by the radio for your favorite song to come on so you could record it before the DJ talked over the intro. Discovery required patience, but more than that, it required people. Taste traveled through homes, cars, and neighborhoods before it traveled through the internet.

Southeast San Diego was a primary architect in the structure of David’s life. Like any big city, the forces intentionally concentrated Black, Latino, and Filipino families into one part of San Diego. In doing so, it also concentrated cultures, sounds, styles, languages, and ways of being. What emerged was a neighborhood and a dense cultural ecosystem.

When we talk about education, we usually begin with school. David begins with culture. Before poetry workshops and graduate seminars, there was Southeast San Diego. Before literary craft, there was the craft of observation. Before metaphor, there was slang. Before the page, there were people.

In David’s world, Motown, hip-hop, and Mexican music weren’t competing traditions, but layered inheritances. Adidas, Nike, and Puma weren’t yet “streetwear” so much as the visual language of a community. Basketball courts, slang, music, and neighborhood politics belonged to the same ecosystem. In David’s telling, these weren’t hobbies or interests.

This is culture and culture at large doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Music informs fashion. Fashion speaks the language of the neighborhood. Basketball models discipline. Slang informs language. Together, they taught David how to move through the world.

Gang culture, too, appears in his story, and not as spectacle or confession, but as another institution in that education. It would be easy to flatten this part of his life into a familiar narrative of danger: disenfranchised area of San Diego filled with gang violence. David doesn’t tell this story, though. Instead, he describes the ecosystem. It taught him where to sit, how to notice people, how to interpret posture, clothing, language, and silence. “I still don’t like to sit with my back to a door,” he admitted, almost laughing at himself. Decades later, after becoming a celebrated poet, professor, husband, and father, that instinct remains.

That admission lingered with me.

One of the quiet revelations of our conversation was that David doesn’t treat perception as an instinct. He treats it as something learned. Seeing is a practice. It is shaped by geography, by family, by danger and safety, by music, by friendship, and by the communities that teach us what deserves our attention. Long before he learned to write poems, he had already learned how to read the world.

What Was Your First Language?

Maybe naively, I assumed writers possessed language in a way the rest of us didn’t—that they became writers because words came naturally to them. Publication seemed like proof that they’d always access fluency in metaphor, rhythm, and meaning.

But the more time I’ve spent with writers, the less I believe that’s true. What I’ve come to understand is that the relationship to language almost always begins somewhere else. Long before there is literary craft, there is another education. Before language becomes expression, it is survival. Before it becomes art, it becomes identity. Before it becomes poetry, it is a way of making sense of the world.

David’s story suggests that writers aren’t born with language. They’re formed by it.

For David, that first language wasn’t poetry.

It was slang.

“One of the first craft lessons I learned with poetry was slang,” David told me. “Slang was a big deal for me—learning how to express something in a different way.” Later, recalling Run-D.M.C.’s “Peter Piper,” he quoted the line, “Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good.” He paused. “That was the first stretch of poeticism for me.”

For David, slang wasn’t simply vocabulary. It was an early lesson in metaphor. It taught him that words could carry more than one meaning at a time and that language could hold on to as much as it revealed. A word could communicate belonging to one audience while striking out with another. It could transform “bad” into “good” or a neighborhood into a shared identity or dangerous isolation. Long before he encountered poetry in a classroom, he was already learning that language wasn’t fixed. It bent. It shifted. It performed.

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Who Did You Have to Perform Before You Could Become Yourself?

Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, I found myself thinking about the throughline between culture, performance, and imagination.

Not performance as deception, but performance as rehearsal.

Growing up, David learned that survival often required an awareness of how he occupied space. How he dressed. How he walked. How he stood.

“I would think about how I stood... Do I look weak? So you put your chest out... how you walk around... the kind of vibe you give off.”

At first, I understood this as posturing—a necessary performance demanded by gang culture and the neighborhoods that shaped him. But as David continued talking, that understanding began to unravel.

Earlier, he told me he still doesn’t like sitting with his back to the door. This vigilance of code became habit. Habit became perception. Perception became identity.

That’s when I shared with him what had been sitting with me.

“I’m thinking about the relationship between culture, performance, and imagination.”

Throughout our conversation, David had been describing the performances needed to live the life he lived: how to dress, how to carry yourself so no one mistook you for weak. I kept wondering how imagination fit into a world ruled by codes, especially to a poet.

We often talk about imagination as a kind of freedom or the ability to dream beyond circumstances one’s currently navigating. Gang culture, at least in the way it’s often portrayed, seems to leave little room for that. It is remembered through violence, hierarchy, and survival. Imagination is a missing part of that larger narrative.

What is performance if not the act of imagining yourself into a different relationship with the world? Of rehearsing confidence before you possess it. Of embodying a future version of yourself before anyone believes it exists, including yourself.

David didn’t hesitate to respond.

“Everything’s a performance.”

It wasn’t the answer I expected, but it settled the cycling of the three ideas in my mind.

What is performance if it’s not to rehearse a version of yourself that doesn’t yet exist, to believe in a future self strongly enough that your body begins to act like it’s already true.

We often think of performance as something false—a way of pretending to be someone you aren’t. David was describing something much closer to practice.

Growing up Mexican in predominantly Black neighborhoods, he learned to navigate multiple identities at once. There was the culture of his home and the culture of the streets, the person he understood himself to be and the person the neighborhood understood him to be. Those weren’t opposing realities. They were identities continually negotiated, inhabited, and rehearsed.

Performance, then, wasn’t simply survival.

It was a lesson.

Then David said something I haven’t stopped thinking about.

“What is performance but imagining who you could be... and enacting that?”

The sentence collapsed distinctions I’d always held apart.

Performance wasn’t the opposite of imagination.

Performance was imagination made visible.

Whether learning to command respect in a neighborhood, stepping onto a basketball court, or writing a poem, the process was remarkably similar. You imagined a version of yourself. You practiced inhabiting that version. Eventually, the distance between performance and identity began to disappear.

Or, as David put it,

“...you do that for so long it just becomes second nature... it’s really hard to extricate.”

There was something unexpectedly hopeful in that realization.

If performance can become identity, then imagination isn’t escapism. It’s one of the ways we become who we are.

When David laughed and said, “The people who actually believe their bullshit become very good,” he wasn’t celebrating delusion. He was describing conviction—the kind of belief that allows a person to rehearse themselves into becoming.

He eventually connected that idea to poetry.

“That’s no different than art... you imagine it... you figure it out... then at some point you’re like, ‘Oh, this is my lane.’”

By then, I realized we were no longer talking only about gang culture, or Black culture, or Mexican culture. We were talking about the universal work of becoming and the ways culture gives us the first rehearsals for the people we eventually grow into.

What Did Poetry Ask You to Unlearn?

Listening to David tell the story of how he found poetry, it almost sounded accidental.

He went to college to play basketball. His coach needed to fill his schedule and placed him in a poetry class. He wrote a poem. His professor encouraged him to take another class. Later, another professor, Glover Davis, saw something in him and urged him toward graduate school. On paper, the story reads almost too neatly, as though poetry simply happened to him.

But that’s only true if you begin the story with poetry.

The more David spoke, the clearer it was that poetry was farther from the beginning of his education. It was another expression of it.

Long before he ever stepped into a poetry workshop, David had already learned how to devote himself to something. Southeast San Diego taught him observation. Gang culture taught him codes. Hip-hop taught him rhythm. Slang taught him language. Basketball taught him practice.

This differentiation stayed with me because David reached for basketball in our conversation almost as often as he reached for poetry. Every time I asked about writing, he answered with jump shots, coaches, repetition, and the discipline of showing up. Basketball isn’t simply something he plays. Its where he first learned that becoming good at anything is rarely mysterious. It is repetitive. It is often boring. It requires returning to the same thing long after the excitement has worn off.

With this, his work ethic suddenly made more sense.

“I used to carry a dictionary around with me,” he told me. “People thought it was a Bible.”

He lived in professors’ office hours. He interrupted class to ask what words meant. He looked them up later. None of those habits felt separate from the athlete he described. They felt like the same practice wearing different clothes.

He lived in professors’ office hours. He interrupted class to ask what words meant. He wrote them down. He looked them up later. “I didn’t care about embarrassing myself,” he told me; as long as it meant learning.

That sentence stayed with me because it seemed to explain everything else.

David describes himself as a contrarian, someone who likes to test ideas, to see how people respond. But underneath that disposition is something quieter: curiosity. The willingness to admit what you don’t know. The humility to become a beginner over and over again.

When I asked what poetry had required him to unlearn, he answered with what sounded, at first, like a contradiction.

“You have to let go of your ego to be a really great writer while having a very big ego.”

Then he reached for basketball.

A great scorer has to believe every shot can go in. Without that confidence, you never take the shot. But to become a better player, you also have to listen to coaches, trust teammates, and know when not to shoot. Great athletes hold confidence and humility in both hands at once.

“So does an artist,” David explained.

The comparison surprised me less than it probably should have. Throughout our conversation, David had returned to basketball almost as often as he returned to poetry. Not because they were the same discipline, but because they demanded the same kind of person.

Near the end of our conversation, he said something that tied the entire interview together.

“For the same reason I shoot thousands of jump shots at forty-nine years old on a Tuesday... if I’m really into something, I throw myself into it.”

That, more than poetry itself, felt like the throughline of David’s life.

Poetry didn’t make him disciplined.

It found someone who already was.

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What Are You Trying to Preserve?

As our conversation moved beyond poetry as a practice and a profession, I found myself wondering what remained. After a lifetime shaped by the culture of Southeast San Diego, slang, hip-hop, performance, and discipline, what had David decided was worth carrying forward? What, after all these years, was he still trying to preserve?

“I write about certain types of masculinities,” he told me. “I write about urban shit... gang shit.” Then he added, almost matter-of-factly, “While I’m writing about them, it’s inevitable to preserve them.”

I expected him to name memories—to preserve the places he’d lived, the people he’d loved, or the journey that had brought him here. Instead, he named responsibility.

Writing, for David, isn’t an act of memorializing the past. It’s an act of refusing to simplify it. To write honestly about himself, the people, and the places that formed him is to preserve them—not as symbols or stereotypes, but as complex human worlds. Preservation, then, isn’t nostalgia. It’s fidelity.

“When you’re writing about them,” he repeated, “it’s inevitable to preserve them.”

But preservation, as David understands it, is not the same as glorification.

Earlier in our conversation, he argued that performance is one of the ways we become ourselves. Here, he drew an equally important distinction: there is a difference between inhabiting a culture and performing someone else’s.

“The contemporary fetishization of urbanity,” he said, referring to the casual adoption of language, style, and mannerisms detached from the lives that produced them, “drives me up the fucking wall.” It wasn’t simply about slang or aesthetics. It was about context.

“It’s one thing when somebody does it in friendship,” he explained. “It’s another when people adopt a performance that they’re not.”

That distinction stayed with me because it echoed the entire conversation.

The performance David described growing up wasn’t a costume. It emerged from a neighborhood, from relationships, from the constant negotiation of identity and survival. It was lived before it was expressed. What frustrates him now is not that culture travels, it always has, but that it is too often separated from the histories, responsibilities, and human complexity that gave it meaning.

What keeps you writing?

For all of David’s talk about preserving neighborhoods, masculinities, and urban ethos, he always returns to the same place: craft.

“I think there’s a certain type of poetry and excellence in poetry that I’d like to uphold,” he told me earlier in our conversation.

That commitment to excellence explains why, after decades of writing and multiple books, he still speaks less about publication than he does about sentences.

“I pride myself on writing a good line.”

He smiled when he said it, but there was conviction underneath the humor. A good line isn’t simply beautiful. It carries the weight of everything around it.

He recalled something the late poet Tony Hoagland once told him: a poem needs “poles” strong enough to hold it up. Those lines become the structure that allows everything else to exist.

Craft, then, isn’t separate from preservation.

It’s how preservation happens.

If David writes carelessly about the world that formed him, he risks flattening it into stereotype or nostalgia. But if the poem is built with precision (with the right line carrying the right weight) the people, neighborhoods, and cultures that shaped him remain as textured and contradictory as they always were.

That may be why, after all these years, he still speaks about poetry as though he’s just beginning.

“I’m still searching... that perfect poem.”

He laughed almost immediately after saying it.

“It’s never gonna happen. You’re never gonna write the perfect poem.”

Then, without missing a beat:

“That’s the part that I like chasing.”

By the end of our conversation, I understood that David isn’t trying to arrive anywhere. The pursuit is the point. The same curiosity that led him to carry a dictionary through college, the same discipline that kept him shooting jump shots on a Tuesday afternoon, the same attention that taught him to hear poetry in slang—all of it still animates the work.

The man I met years ago wasn’t different from the boy he described that afternoon.

He was the accumulation of him.

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I usually woke up thinking I had five more minutes. As I got older, five became ten, then fifteen, until my grandmother’s voice made it clear that my time had run out. She had a way of calling upstairs that told me exactly how late I was without ever seeing the clock. On the mornings I pushed it too far, I’d find her already sitting on the porch, Bible and sermon in her briefcase, purse at her side, waiting for me. She never left me behind, but I knew when I made her late. Her disappointment didn’t need volume. It settled over the house quietly, and somehow that felt worse.

When I was still a kid, however, I’d come downstairs still in my pajamas to pancakes, bacon, eggs, grits, and coffee brewing for my grandmother. Years later, breakfast became oatmeal. Later, it became a stop at Dunkin’, McDonald’s, or Starbucks on our drive into Brooklyn. I don’t know if those changes meant anything then. I only remember them now because they marked time. Without realizing it, I was watching our Sunday mornings change.

The house at 615 had a smell I still can’t describe. It didn’t smell like cinnamon or bacon or Pine-Sol. It just smelled like itself. If someone bottled it and asked me to identify it thirty years from now, I’m sure I could.

Most Sunday mornings were quiet. The television, usually buzzing through the week, with news, Gunsmoke, or a game, stayed off. The curtains were open, but only the kitchen light was on. The loudest sound wasn’t conversation or gospel music. It was the aged house announcing that my grandmother was awake. Floorboards creaked as she moved through the common areas downstairs. The click of her heels echoed against hardwood. Before I ever saw her, I knew exactly where she was.

Sunday felt different from other days long before we pulled up outside the church on Williams Ave in East New York.

The difference wasn’t excitement. It wasn’t even church itself. It was the almost silent hum of intention. The day had a shape to it before I became part of it.

As a child, I never questioned where that shape came from.

Breakfast was on the table. Clothes were ready. My grandmother’s briefcase held her Bible, that day’s sermon, and a handkerchief (which she made sure to carry, even with the ones in her desk at the church). Sometimes, if she had picked it up from the dry cleaners, the robe she’d preach in came with us, too.

Part II: Getting Ready

After breakfast, the house got quiet again.

There wasn’t much talking. We were still waking up, moving slowly from pajamas into the people we were about to become. Once I got to a certain age (maybe 8 or 9), I laid out my own clothes. They had already been washed, but Sunday mornings were for the final touches. If something needed to be ironed again, it was. Wrinkles weren’t acceptable. Your clothes had to match. Your shoes had to be clean. Looking presentable wasn’t a fashion statement; it was about showing care.

I didn’t understand the context of those rules, but I didn’t question them, then: I knew that’s just what Sunday required.

It wasn’t until I got older that I thought about why I wouldn’t go outside with a wrinkle and the habit that I inherited.

The answer wasn’t simply vanity. At least not in my house.

My grandmother belonged to a generation of Black people whose relationship to clothing was shaped by more than personal preference. These were Black people who lived with limited funds, limited opportunity, and limited control over how the world saw them. What they could control was how they presented themselves. Clothes were made because buying them wasn’t always possible. They were washed carefully because replacing them wasn’t easy. They were ironed because wrinkles suggested neglect, and neglect was a luxury Black people couldn’t afford to have projected onto them. My grandmother taught that to her kids, and my mom modeled that lesson for us.

Presentation wasn’t separate from dignity. It was one of the ways dignity became visible.

That understanding has stayed with me. Even now, when I steam a shirt before leaving the house or change because something doesn’t feel quite right, I don’t think I’m performing respectability. I think I’m participating in an inheritance. My grandmother taught us that care could be seen.

But somewhere in and around those lessons about care were lessons about my body.

I don’t remember there being a long conversation about modesty. I don’t remember anyone sitting me down to explain the politics of a hemline or a neckline. Instead, those lessons accumulated quietly and over time. Pants weren’t appropriate for church. Dresses couldn’t be too short. If you were going to shout, dance, or fall out, you needed to make sure your clothes covered you in every position your body might find itself.

It all made sense before I understood what it meant.

Only later did I realize that those instructions assumed something about my body before I ever had the chance to. They assumed it could distract. That it could invite attention. That someone else might look at it in a way I wasn’t yet capable of imagining. Long before I understood desire, I understood that my body needed to be managed.

The irony is that while I was learning how to manage my body, I wasn’t learning how to live in it.

No one asked what made me feel comfortable in my clothes. No one asked how I experienced my changing body. The conversations were almost always about whether it was covered enough, appropriate enough, respectable enough.

Looking back, I don’t think anyone intended for me to experience that outcome.

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Part III: My Grandmother

If Sunday had a rhythm, my grandmother was its metronome.

She rarely announced what needed to be done. She simply did it, over and over, until care became the language of the house. Floors were cleaned before they looked dirty. Meals were prepared before anyone asked what was for dinner. Wednesday afternoons belonged to Bible study preparation. Saturday nights belonged to Sunday morning prep. There was always something being made ready.

She didn’t separate sacred work from the ordinary.

Preparing a sermon seemed to require the same attention as ironing a blouse. Cleaning the house deserved the same care as greeting people after service. Even the things I couldn’t see as a child received her full attention.

That’s why I still think about the sheets my grandmother ironed; they made the least sense to me.

Clothes made sense. People would see those.

But sheets?

They disappeared beneath her comforter. They were wrinkled again the moment she or Pop climbed into bed. As a child, it felt like perfection for perfection’s sake.

Now I’m not so sure.

Maybe ironing the sheets had nothing to do with other people.

Or maybe it had everything to do with the belief that care wasn’t determined by visibility.

That some things deserved attention simply because they were yours to tend.

I don’t know.

I could ask, but what I do know is that she taught me to notice the relationship between care and preparation.

She believed in staying ready. The house stayed ready. Food stayed ready. Her sermons stayed ready (she kept a digital and physical copy of every one). Her clothes stayed ready. She stayed ready.

Preparation wasn’t something my grandmother did before important occasions. It was how she lived. Sunday didn’t require a different version of her because Saturday had already prepared for that. The house had already been prepared for us. She wasn’t getting ready for life. She lived ready.

I’ve carried that with me.

I still straighten pillows with no guests arriving. I steam clothes that are way too wrinkly before I leave the house. I rearrange small details that I have to call my husband’s attention to.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m honoring her silent lessons. Other times I wonder if I’m simply repeating her.

Because there is a difference.

And lately I’ve been asking a harder question.

My grandmother extended extraordinary care to sermons, to family, to guests, to church, to her home.

I don’t know if she ever believed she deserved the same kind of attention.

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It was a normal Thursday morning on April 21, 2016. The kind of day that had a little surprising ease to it. Then Jasmine’s text came through. Just: No.

One word. But I knew exactly what it meant.

I broke down. I left work early that day. It felt dramatic, even then, but some losses have a gravity that reorganizes everything around them, and this was one of those. On my way home, a family friend told me something I’ve carried ever since: that Prince was now an ancestor. Not gone. Transitioned. Elevated into the lineage of those who shaped us while they were here and laid a pathway for us to walk in their absence. It was the right word for the right moment, and I’ve thought about it many times since.

Outside of the Apollo Theater in 2022

I have been trying, for years, to articulate what Prince means to me. Not to the world. That part is documented, celebrated, and endlessly analyzed. But to me, Porsalin, specifically. To the girl I was becoming when I first encountered him, and to the woman I’ve continued becoming in his wake.

What I keep landing on is this: Prince gave me permission.

Not permission to be wild, though he was. Not permission to be provocative, though he was that too. Permission to exist in the space between. Masculine and feminine, sacred and sensual, discipline and freedom, the deeply private and the gloriously public. He occupied that space not as a compromise or an uncertainty, but as a choice. As mastery of that slight and elusive space.

I grew up understanding that presentation was power. That the way you moved through a room, the way cloth fell on your body, the way you assembled yourself before you walked out the door. I knew these were not things of vanity. They were language. Prince spoke that language at a level that felt almost supernatural. The ruffles, the heels, the eyeliner on a small frame. The countless stories of his presence in a room that felt mystical and beyond explanation. He understood that personal style was not decoration. It was philosophy made visible.

That’s what I’ve been reaching toward in my own life: not his particular aesthetic, but his approach to one. The idea that you can think deeply about how you present yourself to the world and have it mean something. That taste is not thoughtless. That attention to beauty is a serious practice. That you can be quiet and still command a room, spiritual and still centered in your body, particular and still universal.

He was also — and this part rarely gets airtime — uncommonly disciplined. The myth of Prince is all excess and genius and purple fog, but underneath it was someone who worked. Who practiced. Who diligently read the Bible. Who understood that to move through this world as Prince required craft. That freedom was something you earned through rigor. His vault is reportedly filled with thousands of songs recorded across his career. He could play nearly every instrument on his albums. The flamboyance was real, but so was the work ethic that made it possible.

The combination of the spiritual seriousness, the aesthetic precision, the quiet relentlessness is something I return to when I think about what it means to build a body of work, a point of view, a life that holds together.

I grieved publicly. If you knew me then or know me know, you know I love Prince, and I broke down in front of 8th graders and coworkers. But the way I felt the grief, the loss I experienced, was its own personal thing. There’s a particular ache in losing someone who showed you something about yourself that no one else had shown you. Someone whose existence had been quietly instructive for years, and whose absence you’d have to carry forward now as the lesson.

He’s an ancestor. My family friend was right about that.

I tend to Prince the way you tend to any ancestor whose gifts are still alive in you: by trying to honor what he modeled. By taking beauty seriously. By refusing to choose between the spiritual and the sensual, the disciplined and the free. By understanding that how you show up, completely, is a form of devotion.

Prince didn’t make me who I am. But he helped me recognize who I was trying to become.

That feels like more than enough. That feels, honestly, like reason for art.

Prince in Under the Cherry Moon

That’s a kind of confidence. Not the confidence of someone who doesn’t care what you think, but the confidence of someone who has been at bats with this way longer than you’ve had access to it. The movie is bad. Genuinely, objectively bad in parts of the film. And whether or not Prince knew that didn’t matter. Because maybe the general checkmark in good or bad was never the point. The point was a part of a larger statement he was making, and that that statement was coherent even when the film wasn’t.

Prince never explained himself. That was the point.

—

For years he built a wall of mystique so deliberate it functioned like costuming: you could be moved by him without ever quite knowing him. Parade (the soundtrack to Under the Cherry Moon) lived inside that wall, and it took risks from inside it. Prince was always willing to experiment, but the experimentation on Parade was protected. The mystique held. It was lush, strange, collaborative like many of the albums before it. Wendy, Lisa, and other members of The Revolution were vital in shaping the sound of this. But the credits of his next album help tell a different story. Songs Wendy and Lisa helped create, music they’d been inside of, and their names missing from credits (they’re only listed on 3 songs on the 16). The Revolution was dissolved. The collaboration there was broken. Prince intentionally moved forward, and they were left solely in the liner notes of this new chapter: “Thank U.” (Tea.)

Wendy, Prince, Lisa in ‘86 by Jeff Katz

Then 364 days later came Sign O’ The Times, and something shifted.

The opening track doesn’t work to seduce you. It doesn’t try to pull you in. It doesn’t “perform”. It opens with a declarative sentence about AIDS and doesn’t flinch. For a man who’d built an entire universe out of innuendo and a kind of mythology, this was almost scarily clear. He had something to say and he said it. He shed the racially ambiguous presentation he had with The Revolution and moved toward a visual aesthetic that stamped his blackness — not as a concession to the culture, but as a claiming of it. Cat Glover as his caramel counterpart onstage. The boom bap of “Housequake” and “Hot Thing” channeling the Golden Age that Hip Hop was just beginning to name. This wasn’t Prince following Black culture. It was Prince finally making visible what had always been the root of it.

It wasn’t a reinvention. It was a declaration of direction.

Cat Glover & Prince for Sign O’ the Times

That’s the thing about real taste: it doesn’t drift. It decides. The people whose style stays interesting over time aren’t the ones who go with the current, they’re the ones who know when the current has finally caught up to something they already understood. Prince didn’t chase the sonic shift of the mid-eighties. He recognized it as the moment to stop being so mysterious about who he was.

That kind of move, one that’s deliberate, directional, rooted, is what reveals the dimension between taste and aesthetic. Aesthetic is visible, legible, something you can point to. But taste is what’s underneath it, giving it pressure. Prince’s aesthetic shifted, his band, his beats, his sonic palette, and that shift made his taste (that was always there) readable to the culture maybe for the first time. The influence of Sly & The Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, and Marvin Gaye had always been there, but started to break through into his musical and lyrical choices. The mystique hadn’t disappeared. It had just found something worth being clear about.

That’s the move. Not abandoning the surface, but letting it finally say something clear.

The cost of the mysterious intangible is that you get to stay safe. The mystique holds, nothing is risked, no one can say you got it wrong in the performance. But at some point, the wall stops being a strategy and starts being a habit. And habits don’t have arguments or change lives.

The question isn’t whether you’re willing to shift. It’s whether you’re getting clear about what you’re shifting toward. Like friend and mentor of Prince Miles Davis cautioned us, “Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”

Me. The Kenzo skirt. 2022.

What followed was a critical voice I heard often: "You're supposed to know how to do this. The art of being fly is one you've mastered." But my voice hadn’t accounted for the shift I was in the midst of. The version of me that existed before and during my pregnancy was gone. I didn't know how to dress the woman standing in the mirror — and I hadn't been taking the time to get to know her.

What I thought then was that my clothes were the issue. So I scrapped my closet: the good ole rebrand. Purge what once was, buy all the new, trendy pieces.

For weeks, I was pulling looks, documenting every outfit, gauging the likes of one fit against another. But the excitement of the new lost its luster. The clothes didn't have the longevity I longed for. They spoke to the moment, not the person.

Me. Postpartum. 2025

I'd actually read Aesthetic Intelligence before. My husband gifted it to me in 2021 when I was transitioning from education into styling. I thought it held sound ideas, underlined a few things, and moved on. But coming back to it now, Pauline Brown's definition stopped me: "the ability to understand and articulate the feelings objects evoke." I underlined it again — in a deeper purple pen. This time it wasn't a concept. It was a diagnosis.

My struggle wasn't my old body versus my new one. It was that I'd lost the ability to articulate what I was feeling when I looked at myself. My fluency was gone.

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Growing up the granddaughter of a pastor and the child of an artist, how you looked mattered. Not in the way the fashion industry means it — not labels or price points — but ironing, tailoring, cleanliness, and overall presentation. Attention. We had antiques over a hundred years old in our home, passed down through early generations of Black Americans, that we polished regularly, getting into the nooks and crannies of every corner. There was a pride in presentation that had nothing to do with having the most expensive and everything to do with caring for what you had.

bell hooks names this in "An Aesthetic of Blackness" in Yearning, where she contrasts the home she grew up in with the home of her ancestors — describing her own as dead and ugly, and the other as a place where beauty was a force to be created and imagined. She writes of a "violent anti-aesthetic" rooted in possession over perception, and traces how consumerism displaced what she calls "that predicament of heart that called us to yearn for beauty." The alternative — her ancestral home — was one where lacking materially was never an excuse for failing to develop an eye, to see beauty, to cultivate inner well-being.

This is the tradition I come from. And somewhere in the postpartum fog, I lost sight of it. Not intentionally. But the rebrand, the chasing of things, the gauging of likes — that was the violent anti-aesthetic in practice.

Consumption standing in for attention.

After a few good weeks of outfits, the initial rush wore off.

I had made myself into a caricature of Porsalin.

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My style has always come from a clear mental view of myself — one built through music: listening to favorite albums, making playlists, and going to hear live music. Or through reading something new that excited me. Without these practices, seeing myself clearly was almost impossible. And now, being a mom meant my time and mental capacity were limited like never before. I hadn't just lost the fluency. The interior life of motherhood had consumed my bandwidth, and with it, the rituals that kept me fluent in style.

I had to learn to let how I feel guide me. Structure, but looser. Dimension, but flexible. Getting dressed took longer, but I couldn't rely on what I knew — I had to trust what I felt. The slightest adjustment made all the difference: a belt, a half-tucked shirt, a folded pant. The time I had been giving entirely to motherhood, I began to invest back into figuring myself out. Early morning walks, or late ones, replaced music. I started noticing architecture, feeling the shift in weather, watching how people interpret a change in season through what they wear.

Style is so often defined as something you either have or you don't. What I learned is that there is ebb and flow. Relearning and re-teaching yourself what you need to find your way back. The work I'd done as a stylist with my clients was work I had to do with myself.

The class Dressed by Taste was born out of this. Reinvention, I’ve come to see, is central to personal style — not just reinventing the clothes, but reinventing the processes that get you there. The attuning, the attention, the editing. The willingness to see yourself again, slowly, without punishment.

If this resonated, I built something for exactly this. Learn more about Dressed by Taste →

Dressed by Taste

The tales of motherhood could replace nightmares; the sleepless nights & expectation to be the baby’s everything is what’s described. As the last days of my pregnancy approached, I feared loss of the life I’d built & difficulty I’d experience in embracing a new one.

This western view of motherhood isolates the mother from community, placing sole responsibility of the child on her alone. When this horror becomes reality, it proves to be unsustainable. In The Spirit of Intimacy, Sobonfu Somé says that when a child’s welfare is placed only on the mother & father, it’s overbearing for two people. She asks, “How can we move toward a more sane family structure?” Her answer? Community.

A month ago, I gave birth to our beautiful girl, Noah. Since then, I’ve experienced a range of emotions, but with gratitude to my community, I haven’t had dejection expressed about early motherhood. At every turn, someone has cooked food, offered to babysit or hold her while we handled other things, washed dishes, encouraged me, purchased gifts, etc.

Through this support, I’ve understood that while I am Noah’s mother, she doesn’t belong to me, alone. “If a child grows up with the idea that Mom & Dad are her or his only community, then when she has a problem, if the parents cannot fix it, she doesn’t have anyone else to turn to.” Through our community, Noah will learn that she has a network of people to uphold her.

In Protector, Beyoncé sings of her role as a light & guide for her children. “… Even though I know someday you’re gonna shine on your own, I will be your projector.” As she continues, she highlights that her motherhood doesn’t exist in a vacuum, that the love for her children results from the love that preceded the child. “I first saw your face in your father’s gaze. There’s a long line of hands carrying your name.” To develop a romantic love that resulted in Noah’s life is one of the greatest gifts I’ve received. Through our love we’ll be able to show her that love can be found & cultivated beyond the bounds of romantic & familial love to embrace a communal love; a love that holds a legacy, like the love, legacy, & community that carried us & Noah here.

Over this last week, I was drawn to the color orange. Perhaps because it’s getting a little colder, I whipped out my handy-dandy orange trench, that I salvaged from the sales rack of an H&M in Soho over a decade ago. So with this captivation, I headed over to Pinterest (IYKYK) for inspiration.

I can’t say orange is a substantial color in my wardrobe, but when I do wear it, it's often when I feel a creative surge and I prefer for orange to show up as boldly as possible (the trench, pants, full orange looks, etc.). And without understanding the depths of color theory -- i.e. how it matches my skin tone or how colors blend with the season -- I know I feel powerful at times when I wear orange.

Lazily looking into the meaning of the color orange, I found that it “represents" an array of dispositions from vibrance and energy to the muted nature of autumn. Most interestingly to and fitting for me is the color's association with change, movement, and creativity.

Back in 2018, I started writing again, and my pieces were accompanied by playlists I curated. The first pair, entitled “#notjustaplaylist" was inspired by the color orange. I had been building a Pinterest board with no real goal in sight and (as recounted in the piece on my personal IG), I woke up in the middle of the night and started to make a playlist. Somehow, orange was the start of something -- movement, change, creativity.

All in all, there's no tangible way I see my current partiality to the color orange impacting my life, but as a creature of habit, and someone paying closer attention to the ebbs and flows of life, I assume this time of inspiration is one worth paying attention to. I can assume that in looking forward, I’m looking toward movement, change, and creativity. 

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My therapist challenged me to — in times when I felt a distinct sadness — create a playlist of my favorite songs. I started building that playlist earlier in the year, but by the umpteenth listen, I wasn’t moved any closer to happiness. Instead of selecting the upbeat, inspiring songs to change what I felt, I started pulling the songs that sounded like where I was. I thought to myself: Forget trying to change where you are. Welcome it.

I hope in vibing to this playlist, you’ll embrace the seasonal change and find a place of solitude with yourself that isn’t inherently woeful but reclusively reflective. With confidence, you can practice Seasonal Discretion.

Last December, I invited Sissy to Rosecrans Florist & Cafe to inform her about Yahdon and my upcoming courthouse wedding. Picking up on my nervousness about how she’d respond to news about our private marriage, she suspiciously sipped her latte, anticipating what I brought her here to discuss.

“You can’t say anything,” I cautioned.

“About?”

“We want you to act as the witness when we get married at the courthouse in a couple weeks.”

“Oh, girl! That’s it?” She managed to squeeze an eye roll in between her responses. “Who else would it be?”

Picking the rest of my court was as easy as the coffee date with Sissy could’ve been. I’m not the woman who’d want or have upwards of 10 bridesmaids; a parade of women — some of whom I might have a fragmented relationship with — was not how I wanted to celebrate my union. (Trust me: I’ve heard enough horror stories and seen my share of TikTok videos of the pre - or post-wedding day fallout.) What mattered most to me was having women in my community who supported me and my relationship hold me down on our wedding day. With Sissy, Dom & McKenzie were those people.

I’ve known Dom since freshman year at Pace University’s freshman orientation. She was my first college friend and she introduced herself with more enthusiasm than I could handle at 10 am in a room full of strangers: “My name is Dominique. Guess my last name. It’s a water animal and a body part!”

Entering my second year of teaching and changing schools, I met McKenzie in 2015 during the new-hire orientation for KIPP in New Orleans. I don’t remember the specifics of our first meeting outside of this, but that speaks to the natural nature of our friendship.

There are hilarious, meaningful, & padlocked stories that color the decades and years of my sisterhood with all these women (and maybe one day I’ll tell a few), but as I think through and heal from the ending of friendships I thought would last forever, I’m reminded to express gratitude for the friends who’ve stayed, to honor the truth that somewhere, somehow, I do belong.

Cole goes on to pray, “Protect these bonds… And, having seen one another face-to-face, give us the courage to remain.”

I’ve been stuck on a piece for a few weeks. But my homie Jenisha told me, “That’s normal… When I’m stuck I just read.” So instead of being cemented at this roadblock, I started to read. (And being married to the King of Literary Swag is a plus; telling him about my block meant that within 5 minutes, I had 5 book recommendations to help me out of this rut.)

Here’s a peek into what I’m currently reading for inspiration, motivation, and a deeper understanding of innovation.

Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human by Cole Arthur Riley

This book is a gift that keeps on giving. The vulnerability with which Riley approaches an inclusive and vast spirituality is inspiring as a creative and spiritual person. She recounts stories and experiences that drove her to write this book. Each section of Riley’s work consists of letters, prayers, breathing exercises, and reflection questions that take the reader on an immersive journey. Riley speaks to the truth and struggles of “the process” and the grace we need to navigate it. “…calling demands that we honor it’s fluidity,” Riley writes. “Not all calls are eternal. The ebb and flow with us — with our needs, our community, and our loves… We are called to whatever makes us more human.”

The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story by Christopher Castellani

When my husband gave me this, and read the excerpt that shifted his approach to writing, I believed that The Art of Perspective would pull me and my pen out of our slump. Castellani encourages the writer to remember that the fundamental truth of a story is less important than the tools an author uses to tell the story. “…I believe most strongly in an author’s artful and intentional manipulations… I believe in craft, which is nothing more than an informed bet an author makes on the set of tools at her disposal.”

Why I Write by George Orwell

Orwell’s collection of essays in Why I Write serves as a master class in fascinating writing. In the first essay Why I Write, Orwell revisits the origin story of his love of writing. He depicts what writing looked like over various stages of his life, always being driven by an outside force. “Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside.”

Apart from his journey in and relationship with writing, Orwell outlines what he explains are “four great motives for writing”. They are sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. Reading this so far has caused me to reflect on my own writing journey, why it continues to be a part of my life, and which of these four motives drives me to the points at which I’ve decided to write again (lol).

Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work by Edwidge Danticat

Growing up, Edwidge Danticat’s books were in the house — my sister’s father is Haitian. Though previously familiar with the author, this is my first time reading Danticat’s work. Full transparency: getting through the first chapter of this was difficult. She’s a brilliant writer, which goes without saying. At the same time, there are a couple of factors that I believe played into my reading/comprehensive struggle thus far: (1) it’s written with a previously named context of being for immigrant creators, which is an experience I can sympathize with, but not one I inherently understand and (2) she writes with a lot of historical information concerning Haiti, which I’m not extremely familiar with. This, however, is the beauty and the work of reading. “We, as we read,” Danticat quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, “must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.”

With this, I was able to appreciate how I navigated the first chapter; it forced me to engage with the writing on a molecular and sentence level, rather than breezing through it. I was able to grapple with gaining a different understanding that I wasn’t necessarily looking for. Spending this kind of time with Danticat’s work also led me to think about points in my own writing where I might want the reader to spend more time grappling with ideas and what that could look like.

Dicken and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby

Let’s acknowledge the obvious: duh! Of course, I would have a Prince-related book in the mix. But honestly, I’ve been seeing this book for a while but wanted no parts of it mainly because when it comes to Prince, who is understood to be enigmatic, the takes on him seem to reach toward being as mysterious. And without knowing much about Dickens, I assumed this would be a reach. But Hornby begins the book candidly telling the reader that this won’t be the kind of book where he tries to draw these far-fetched comparisons between the unlikely pair. Instead, he seems to be approaching the comparison with an analysis of their similar backgrounds (including poverty and abandonment) and hypothesizing if these play a role in the two becoming who they are in our society. “One could argue that they became famous because of their poverty rather than in spite of it,” Hornby writes.

Writing this was inspiring. It’s helped me synthesize what I’ve been reading, think about ways to apply it to my own writing, and push my mind to navigate language in the ways that some of these writers do.

Hopefully, all of this will bring about a pathway through this writer’s block.

The dust settles with Prince’s literal come-to-Jesus moment: “Save me, Jesus, I've been a fool”. The pain that comes with falling along the trek is in part what helps to make going this way worthwhile.

Duh, Prince (read: Porsalin)!

He ends with a chant I have partially tattooed on my right arm: “Love is God; God is Love. Girls and boys love God above”. Bypassing the religious undertone, the culmination of this song presents a confirmation to me: that arm in arm with the falls, cuts, and scrapes I have and will experience in this life is the promise that there is hope for light at the end of this tunnel.

This is my song. Welcome to the Ballad of Anna Stesia.

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