Born in Brooklyn to Jamaican immigrants with almost no record of their past, I found I was always looking for something. My family took to calling me Chadder-box because I was so full of questions; questions that, to their frustration, they rarely had answers for. Decades later—following an OCD diagnosis, a COVID spring spent alone indoors, and a string of health hiccups—a friend gifted me Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Within the first page I saw my child self in her story: “I was always bending over to tie my shoes, delaying, trying to figure out something.” By the end, I saw a map. Lorde’s biomythography, threading her "journeywoman pieces back together," helped me understand fragmented familial histories as landscapes that could be placed, explored, and even recovered. In the years since encountering Zami, I have tried to build my own maps. My poetics practice began as, and continues to be, an exploration of how loss remakes us. Trained as an ethnographer in my undergraduate studies, with a focus on Afro-diasporic migration and identity formation, my writing stems from a desire to retrace and reclaim Black Caribbean oral histories and folk knowledges within and beyond the Antilles. Through poetry, I work to reconstruct both a collective and deeply personal archive: to know my mother, who passed of ovarian cancer the year after I was born, through the stories her ancestors carry forward. I am particularly interested in West African spiritual practices brought to the Caribbean—such as Obeah (a healing and spell-casting tradition said to descend from enslaved Akan peoples)—that resist colonial oppression and serve as vessels for ancestral memory and connection, even in the absence of written records or physical proximity. My pursuit of these questions took on renewed urgency following my own migration to Berlin in 2022. The physical distance from my homeland, paradoxically, afforded me the mental space I needed to channel my familial grief into a consistent writing practice. This transition also connected me to writing communities across Europe and beyond, which helped nurture these explorations, including workshops at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop and the Hopscotch Reading Room; a scholarship with In Surreal Life; and a residency at the Mothership Tangier. This time spent immersed in creative community and routine practice has resulted in a short collection of poems and poetic essays, informed by family interviews and independent archival research, that meditate on motherlessness as both a personal inheritance and a diasporic condition. I am currently working with Berlin-based Err Editions to develop this work into a chapbook entitled Comely the Seed Bereft of Earth’s Ease. While my writing has advanced through self-study, community workshops, and informal mentorship—as well as a decade working as a cultural researcher and strategist—I am now pursuing an MFA in poetry at Randolph College, where I will study with queer poet and activist Danez Smith. With the support of the Justin Burnell Memorial Scholarship, I hope to dedicate myself more fully to this work; completing my MFA and bringing these recovered histories into the world through language. I can think of no better way to honor a life devoted to writing and to the dignity of queer lives than by committing fully to both.