Dance like how?
So… what kind of writer are you?
So… what kind of writer are you?
Every time someone asks me this, it feels like I’m answering a dirty question.
Like when Drake asked, “Oh you dance? Dance like how — like ballet and shit?”
Oh.
Truth be told, even after nearly fifteen years of professional experience, I don’t always know.
I don’t know if I have a definitive answer to a question like that. If I were a dancer, I’d probably be hip hop or maybe jazz. If I were a singer, R&B. Those things feel easy to define when you look at someone’s body of work.
But writing isn’t one-size-fits-all and my writing has never been one-size-fits-all.
I’ve never written — for myself or for others — with limitations.
Since the beginning I’ve just wanted to write.
To do what feels right.
What feels real.
When I first started, I’d sometimes introduce myself as a hip hop writer. A journalist. But saying that now feels like some nineties shit nobody does anymore.
Except… we are all still doing it.
At full speed.
Living our wildest millennial dreams. A bunch of thirty and forty year old replicas of Khadijah James, Charlamagne and Big Tigger, Sanaa Lathan in Brown Sugar, or Carrie Bradshaw if you were into that sort of thing. A lot of us grew up wanting to be iCarly. And that’s exactly what we got.
We’re giving out opinions. Writing silly little articles. Linking up with other creatives. Doing interviews. Making videos. Recording podcasts.
All of it.
Which technically makes us journalists.
For those of us who’ve wanted to write and make media professionally since elementary school, this level of access feels like a fever dream. We have the tools. We can make the thing.
And those same tools — and their algorithms — can whoop our asses if we let them. Which brings me back to my naming myself.
A journalist?
In nature. On paper. In spirit.
I have the education. I have the experience. But I’ve never fully run in journalist circles. Never held a major media role.
At least not yet.
A poet?
Nah.
Poetic, yes. But not a poet.
A novelist?
Ehh… I’ve written novels. Maybe ten or twenty. And I plan to keep doing that.
But that’s like calling an MC a rapper.
A playwright?
Yeah. Probably not again.
A screenwriter?
Done that. I’ll do it again later. Just not right now.
So I land right back where I started.
A writer.
About a year ago, I was out with someone when they introduced me to a friend, they said, “She’s a creative here in Atlanta.”
I hated that. I was torn.
It would’ve been so much easier to just say writer — something they knew me as, something they even benefited from, if only by proximity.
That’s when I knew a few things.
First, I wasn’t going hard enough to cement my name as a writer. Just a writer. I’d earned my stripes, and they knew it. But I also knew I didn’t want to explain my work — or my worth — through that relationship.
And that’s the real thing I was able to put in my tool belt:
Naming myself matters more than how someone else does it.
I walked away from that understanding there are many places where I don’t seek validation. Not as a writer. Not as a creative. Not as a woman. Not as anything, really.
But I also learned the cost of not defining myself for myself. I didn’t realize how much it stayed with me until it did.
Also, they were a fucking hater.
Though, still all these months later, it surfaced quietly — while rewriting my own website copy.
So I write.
Write like how? Like books and shit?
Yeah.
That’s where it gets interesting.
The last book I worked on was a biography with a 40 Crip ex bank robber. Now I’m working through what grief looks like in prose, across multiple generations.
The work keeps changing.
The through line is me.
So when people ask what kind of writer I am, the answer is simple:
I write on my own terms. For myself first. And when I recognize a voice or a story worth lending my pen to, I meet it there.
This is where I start again.
Stay with me. This space is different, this space
for the work — and the thinking around it.