This guide implicates the ways in which I use writing to navigate awkward situations. The essay featured on this page seeks to explore the broader motivations of my writing, and the ways in which I seek to do such navigating. The essay demonstrates how awkward situations are larger than race, and expand into my adolescence. In the midst of the writing process, I could not isolate my identity as a writer today from that of my adolescent self. 

 

When attempting to pin point why and how I write, I was very quick to divide my identity as a writer between personal and professional. But there was too much overlap. I couldn’t separate one from the other. The paper below is a negotiation of these two realms of writing, and how my intersectional identity as a black woman in white spaces facilitates the overlap.

 

When I was writing this, I thought about how much I was inspired by so many writers, and in particular poetry slams. I’ve never been dry eyed at a poetry slam. And while it was obvious that I desired to write like the poets on stage, I wanted to understand how and why I was so moved by their writing, to understand what it was I wanted my writing to do.

 

The essay below gets at all of these ideas, so take a look.