About Me
my work
I grew up in Watts and Compton. At fourteen, the 1965 Watts uprising scared me shitless. In April 1992, at forty-one, I watched my children’s favorite Jack in the Box burn on television while trying to explain to my three preteen children why police officers had beaten Rodney King.
In 2009, I wrote Compton4COPS, a plan to improve policing in my city and help my children make sense of what made no sense. They read it; few others did. Policing in Compton has improved somewhat, but it still has a long way to go. The millions paid to settle claims involving Sheriff’s Department misconduct underscore the need to reconsider how Compton defines and provides public safety.
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Published in 2024, my short-story collection, Crooked Out of Compton, was a semifinalist for Chestnut Review’s Stubborn Artists Contest and a finalist for Black Lawrence Press’s 2020 Big Moose Prize. The collection tells gritty stories about people who find hope—and even joy—when their basic needs are difficult to meet.
my community
My mother blessed our childhood home in the public housing projects with Compton’s Encyclopedia, DC Comics, and MAD magazines. The literary world rarely came to Compton, but those books brought other worlds to us.
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Bob Marley reminded us that a closed door can lead to an open one. After Compton4COPS, I still had more to say. Fiction became that open door—a way to tell stories rooted in the community that raised me.
