I'm a poet, writer, and scholar who grew up in the Oakland flatlands and writes and researches extensively on the black Bay Area.

My debut poetry collection Black California Gold (Bucknell University Press, 2025) explores place, politics, and lineage through the intimate lens of a mixed race black/Chinese American girl navigating lineage, home, language, and belonging in the Bay Area in the 1980s and 90s.

I teach in the areas of race, food, nature, the body, the Second Great Migration, black California, kinship and mothering, and the post-1965 Asian immigrant experience at San José State University where I am Associate Professor of African American Studies.