Columbus, Ohio
Writing of Witness with Elizabeth Rosner
I’m a queer, Jamaican-American freelance journalist, organizer and video maker based out of Columbus, OH. After being born and raised in Cleveland to Jamaican parents, I went on to study Creative Writing at Ohio University and earned my BA in 2015. From 2014 onward, I have organized wherever I’ve lived, whether bringing Black Lives Matter to my university campus in 2014-2015, working for a labor union in Seattle and participating in the Standing Rock movement or as an organizer with the Black, Queer and Intersectional Collective at the height of the George Floyd protests.
This is why political questions about the Afro-diaspora, Black liberation, and queer life are present throughout my writings as freelance journalist and essayist. My work ranges from op-eds in Teen Vogue about the impacts of Trump’s presidency, journalistic features on the impacts of predictive policing software on poor, Black communities, and creative non-fiction essays that unpack the pitfalls of Black political iconography. As an artist, I am committed to reflecting the world I wish to live in with my work.
As a member of the Writing of Witness master class, I will be honing some of the later passages of my memoir, which charts my political coming of age and coming out in Obama and Trump’s America from the perspective of a young, closeted Black boy growing up on the East side of Cleveland to a queer, Black adult grappling with questions of liberation.