Hummingbird Ritual
I like the phrase “Hummingbird Ritual” because it evokes dual visions: cake and bird. Nourishment and nature.
On the one hand, it brings to mind the deeply Southern and nostalgic kitchen-centered care of slicing a thoughtfully baked Hummingbird cake to share and to mark time. Nutmeg, mace and caramelized pineapple filling the senses and tracing diaspora through relationship and ritual.
The phrase could also follow the hummingbird’s habits: the idea of making a nourishing ritual out of pleasure-seeking, out of the mutually beneficial encounter—no matter how fleeting. It could follow the hummingbird’s shimmering promise: it’s the messenger. The harbinger of journeywork. The bringer of transformation and regeneration.
Hummingbird Ritual speaks to my own desire to explore and make connections among the ineffable and ephemeral. It’s an umbrella term for the creative, project-oriented, and events arm of my work as a doula, artist, scholar and writer. It is also the name of my newsletter. This is where I share updates, reading recommendations, and guided meditations. It is where I write about food, death, grief, and time (cycle, season, ephemerality, becoming). Please join me on Substack and follow Hummingbird Ritual on instagram @hummingbird_ritual
Thirteen Cakes
13 Cakes is my first project under the Hummingbird Ritual umbrella!
This project centers The Cake as a way of celebrating and promoting Black Aliveness (a framework initially developed by Black Studies scholar Kevin Quashie) and as a way of exploring the nature of Black grief—both personal and collective and the overlaps therein. It considers the role of Black women’s (kitchen-centered) care work in helping us navigate grief and loss and in continually reminding us that trauma/death are not the only ways we are known to ourselves.
One of the first questions posed in death doula training is: What constitutes a “good death?” Exploring how me and mine might answer this question reminded me (again) that the relationship between Blackness and death is already overdetermined. This project seeks to open up ways for us to reconsider and reimagine Black Death by highlighting the spaces and practices of care and ritual that support us in our grief, in part, by celebrating the sweetness and beauty of our extra/ordinary lives.
Nebunele Theatre
Thirteen Cakes lives and evolves in large part due to the care, nurturing, and supportive efforts of the supremely smart and spirited group of artist-thinkers that make up the Nebunele Theatre. My work and I have benefited from the Company’s workshops and as recipient of their inaugural artist retreat and development award, CocooNele.
Most recently, my whole, inquiring self has been afforded the opportunity to grow and explore alongside these women as a Company member. Please visit and follow Thirteen Cakes and the full roster of gorgeous projects Nebunele is supporting here.
Selected Past work and Publications
Black Desserts: The Light & Shade of Black Nostalgia
On this gorgeous Black Food Folks podcast hosted by scholar Therese Nelson, I get to share the stage with brilliant Shelley Chapman and talk about how I using the symbolism and emotional connection to cakes to interrogate end of life care for patients and families.
Processing Podcast
Processing Podcast explores the intersection of food and grief and is hosted by mom and daughter Bobbie Comforto and Zahra Tangorra. In this episode, I got to share with these incredibly thoughtful hosts the range of loss and grief that I has been dealing with that year, including the very painful loss of my mom, as well as the non stop violence toward and murder of Black people in this country.
PBS Wisconsin
This episode of PBS Wisconsin Life highlighted the near fanatical and nostalgia-saturated love I have of rum cake. I blame my mom. It’s an older piece but hey, it’s PBS…and it’s rum cake, so….
Edible Madison
Just before moving to Georgia, I was invited to write a column for Edible Madison, one of the best of the Edible series I’ve yet to see. I managed to get a handful of pieces in before the move. This one is about Edna Lewis’s Very Good Chocolate Cake.
The Black Repast
I was proud to write on The Black Repast for the first issue of For The Culture Magazine edited by insanely talented Klancy Miller. I can’t link to my piece, but this is such a beautiful project you should check it out and support it anyway.