As a Bahamian, Black, queer, chronically ill, and disabled poet, I know that the same forces that demand and prevent my movement are the ones that have come to precipitate the climate crisis: the interplay between racism, hegemony, and capitalism, alongside the half-century worth of colonial pillaging from the “global south” to the  “global north.”

My work is involved with wanting, dreaming, and proving possible a United States (and a larger global context) where folx like me—Black, immigrant, queer (and/or trans), and disabled—can be free, and that such freedoms are critical in the global effort to achieve climate justice. Through collaboration with those who came before me, and those who move alongside me, my writing aims to prove that we live in a world of global poetics: that the way we treat one another has come to affect the weather, the oceans, the ancient and delicate balance of the planet.

Yes, there is a clear tension between these goals of holding the U.S. (and countries like it) accountable while competing for and receiving vital support from its government. Being from a colonized country, this tension animates my life: I would not still be alive if I had not come stateside. Similarly, there is no way to do this work without proper resources, and by design, those resources live, in almost every case, behind the gates of this country’s institutions. And so I am grateful for the National Endowment for the Arts and this year’s adjudicators who expressed belief in my work. Your belief will allow me rest, slower movement, less pain, and a reduced risk of destruction.

Thank you.

We know Audre Lorde said, “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,” but perhaps they allow us to imagine and fashion the tools that will.