The Future Possibilities of Children: An Interview with Gwendolyn Wallace
Photo of Gwendolyn Wallace. Photo courtesy of Gwendolyn Wallace.
By Karla Mendez
To celebrate the publication of her second children’s picture book, THE LIGHT SHE FEELS INSIDE, author Gwendolyn Wallace discusses the importance of community, taking care of each other, and celebrating the light within ourselves.
“The greatest honor of writing children’s books is that you get to be one of their many entrances into the world.”
For Gwendolyn Wallace, growing up she saw books and libraries as sites of independence, possibility, and safety, something she still deeply believes in. The stories found within the pages of books not only offer a portal into worlds beyond our own but also an opportunity to see representations of ourselves, something that is especially crucial for Black Americans. For Black children, to see themselves in books is to be introduced to all the possibilities of who and what they can become, the people that came before them, and their value. Unfortunately, until recently, there has been a dearth of children’s books by and about Black people. According to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, by 2021 that number had risen to 22%.
It’s important for all children to view representations of Black children in moments of joy as it challenges the negative ways Black Americans have been portrayed throughout history. Exposing children to diversity and inclusion at a young age lays the groundwork for them to become adults who treat others equally despite differences. Engaging with books that show experiences different from their own helps to shape their worldview.
As Katie Potter states, “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are inauthentic or negative, they learn a powerful lesson of how they are perceived in the world.” When this occurs, it leads to feelings of isolation, which can accompany them into adulthood. Books like Wallace’s Joy Takes Root and her upcoming text The Light She Feels Inside, are essential to developing Black children’s sense of self and celebrating community.
Discussing The Light She Feels Inside, which was published on October 3rd, author Gwendolyn Wallace speaks about the power of children, the different forms community can take, and the violence behind book bans.
Please note: This interview has been edited for readability.
Karla Méndez (KM): What was the catalyst for writing the book? The inspiration? What moved you to embark on this project?
Gwendolyn Wallace (GW): The catalyst, the moment that really started this project happened before I had even considered writing children’s picture books. I was working in New Haven, and I was observing a kindergarten classroom as part of an early childhood education class, when one day two little girls set up a restaurant in the side room. They invited me to the restaurant, I sat down, and they gave me a menu which was a piece of paper with some scribbles on it. I read the menu, ordered and they brought me my food. We chatted and then at the end I said “This was delicious. What’s my total?” I watched them, and they looked confused for a second and then they went into the corner and conferred with each other. They came back and said it’s free. I said, “Oh, I’ve never been to a restaurant with free food.” They said to me, “Well, food should be free. That’s what we’ve decided.”
That for me was a moment that changed how I thought about children and childhood. I’d worked with kids a lot before that but that’s when I realized that kids don’t just absorb our environment. They take it in, they think about it, and in their play, they also make their own world. That was a moment where I wished there was more messaging for children that spoke to their power to create new worlds. For them to say they’ve been to restaurants and they know that food costs money but in theirs, they want it to be free I think was so special.
I ended up writing this book from about March to June 2020. Like many people, I was at home, on lockdown in my childhood bedroom, watching the news a lot. I was hearing about the protests for racial justice and against anti-Blackness. There was also a lot more messaging about abolition. And though I had identified as an abolitionist before then, I think I was really blown away by the messaging about both our collective ability to tear down what we don’t like and also the beauty and excitement of getting to build a new world. I thought to myself, that’s a lovely message for children even if they might not be able to grasp the entire history of the police industrial complex. It’s a wonderful message to tell children that you can look at what you don’t like and then have the capacity to change it.
I was recently re-reading Some of Us Did Not Die by June Jordan which is my favorite essay collection and there’s an essay called ‘The Letter to Maria.’ In it, Jordan mentions a 15-year-old girl who was interviewed by reporters a couple of days after the 16th Street church bombing, and the little girl said something along the lines of “I feel so good.” She said that taught her the spirit of revolution and resistance. That’s something I think children can help us understand because they have the best imaginations ever. When we create new worlds, they’re going to be there. I really wanted a book that spoke to that. I didn’t see that in the classrooms that I was in. And especially for Black children, there are books that target self-love and books that speak more to that historical narrative. I saw fewer books in that category of, how can we help Black children deal with the feelings that they may have about the world today. And that’s where The Light She Feels Inside came from.
KM: The book didn’t seem like something that would have been available while I was growing up, and maybe you felt the same writing it. In a way, did writing it help to fill in that gap you may have experienced as a kid?
GW: Absolutely. I wrote this book in a lot of ways for my younger self because it’s one that would have helped me a lot when I was growing up. Again, it isn’t just one book that can fill that gap. You know, I’m almost twenty-five and it makes me feel so old to be like “Oh, growing up…” But it’s true. Twenty-five years ago there wasn’t a huge wealth of picture books for Black children. I think one of the only Black picture books I had as a kid was Lift Every Voice and Sing. So now that you can see this kind of wealth of Black children’s experiences fills me with so much joy. It’s such a lovely feeling to be part of that legacy and a part of this movement to help Black children see themselves on the shelves. I suppose you’ll have to ask children if it’s filling a gap. But I hope it is. It fills a gap for little me.
Cover of Gwendolyn Wallade’s book, THE LIGHT SHE FEELS INSIDE.
“It’s a wonderful message to tell children that you can look at what you don’t like and then have the capacity to change it.”
KM: Throughout the book, there’s a strong focus on community and its role in helping young Black girls and boys develop a sense of self. How has community helped you find your sense of self?
GW: Community has been crucial in helping me find a sense of self. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I have one core community that I’m a part of. I’ve been lucky to be a part of many different ones at different times in my life and they’ve all taught me different things. The beauty of community is that you have these safe relationships. And for me, being in a place where I feel safe, where I feel listened to, to be introduced to things I didn’t know otherwise, to be able to explain what is meaningful to me and to justify my opinions of the world makes me feel brave enough to explore other parts of myself. Community will always be a work in progress. Figuring out what communities I want to belong to will always be a part of becoming an adult and finding my relationship to other people.
In this book, I also wanted to think about the importance of role models to community and that finding one isn’t necessarily something that happens naturally. It is something that we need to be taught. We need to have conversations about how we find role models and how we look up to people, especially how you can look around the community you’re in and find them. I really wanted the book to be a roadmap to that because I think finding people that we can look up to, want to be like, and that guide us and shape our worldview is really important. Every child deserves not just one but a wealth of role models.
KM: There is a page that focuses on how Maya doesn’t know what to do with all the glowing inside of her, that it feels too heavy to carry. This seems to be a burden that many Black Americans, particularly children, carry. Can you describe your experience with this burden? How can older adults help in lessening it for young children?
GW: That’s a burden that I’ve always felt even though when I was a kid I didn’t know how to put words to it. It’s something I still feel and don’t ever really expect or even necessarily want to stop feeling. It’s a burden but also, it’s coming to know the world that you live in. But there are ways to make it feel lighter. For kids, what we can do as adults is provide open space. I feel very passionately about the idea that children are all of our collective responsibility. Whether you are a parent or not, whether you have kids or not, we as adults have a responsibility to the children in our community. The book touches on a few parts of how we can help as adults, which is why I hope it’s a really important book for adults too.
I grew up with a lot of messaging about not being angry, and that anger and sadness are really bad emotions, and happiness and excitement are good ones. I think especially for Black children that can be really confusing because anger is extremely powerful. Teaching kids about the spectrum of emotions and how to hold those emotions is really important. As adults, we should also realize that all topics can be introduced to kids in a really age-appropriate way. This is why as adults I think we should read more children’s literature. We should read picture books and YA, and watch children’s TV shows. We should understand how people are talking to kids, and how to talk to kids. I’m a big believer that if there are kids old enough to live something, there are kids old enough to learn about it in an age-appropriate way.
I remember when I was an assistant teacher in a classroom, there was a young girl who wasn’t acting like herself and I asked her what was wrong. She told me her mother had gone to prison that morning. At the time I did not have the words to help her understand what that meant. There was no picture book that I could turn to help her. I wish that I could have opened up a better conversation with her. I wish that there was a conversation I could have had with the class. It’s crucial to remember that as adults, everything that we’re absorbing about the world, kids are too.
As radical people, thinking about how we can incorporate children into our movements is really important; seeing them not as property but as people who have just as much to teach us as we have to teach them. As adults, if we can talk to children, if we can truly be in community with children, and see them as collaborators, that’s the best we can do. I think that makes the burden feel lighter for all of us. If there’s one thing that gives me a lot of hope in the world is children. I feel less pessimistic about the world when I spend time with children. As much as we’re easing their burden, we can ease our own too. And I think that’s really important as a Black woman.
“Community has been crucial in helping me find a sense of self. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I have one core community that I’m a part of. I’ve been lucky to be a part of many different ones at different times in my life and they’ve all taught me different things.”
KM: I think people are so focused on the fact that children are children and convinced they don’t experience things because they’re not going out into the world and doing “adult” things like going to work or paying bills. In reality, they’re actual people with real feelings, experiences, and things to say. We shouldn’t treat them as if what they’re feeling or experiencing is invalid because of their age. We think they have to reach a certain age before we can acknowledge them as fully formed individuals. But what if they’re fully formed as children and as they get older they just evolve into different versions of themselves?
GW: Exactly. And that’s why I wanted to write a book about a community where children are taken seriously. They feel something and can then do something about it. I don’t think that’s a community or an environment that’s particularly hard for us to create, but it does involve adults doing a lot of hard thinking about what they think of children and of childhood. I see children as an oppressed group. The categories of life stages are not something that is biological. When we talk about bio-essentialism when it comes to race and gender, we can also think about that in terms of how we think about childhood. It’s all connected. Our ideas of childhood can’t be divorced from our ideas about race, gender, and disability. Just like we have to unlearn how we think about those things, we have to unlearn how we collectively think about children.
KM: There is also a page where Maya is at the library that highlights the importance of safe and inclusive spaces in which individuals feel welcomed and encouraged. The children in the scene are diverse and representative of differences. How did this page come about? Was this another way to represent the value of community and the development of a sense of self?
GW: You hit the nail on the head. It’s interesting because this was a very intentional conversation that I had with my editor and illustrator. It started with Maya’s friend group. I said that I didn’t want them all to be the same size, have the same style, or the same haircuts. That was really important to me because if I’m writing a book about healthy communities, I want kids to see a community where everybody is welcomed, and include as many visible differences as I can.
I grew up in Connecticut and went to a very small school. It was a very, very White place, so the community around me didn’t look very different. So introducing kids to what different communities look like in a book can be really important for kids who don’t see that much difference around them. I wanted to show a wide variety of people and I also wanted to include people of different ages. I think that often people with differences are used as a learning experience for everyone else or for kids and I didn’t want it to be that. I just wanted there to be lots of different people who are part of a community who aren’t a learning experience.
KM: The book emphasized the importance of having people and spaces where children can express themselves and share what they are feeling and experiencing. This is particularly important for Black children as they constantly have to battle against their adultification by our society. For you, what does this space look like? Who do you go to share your feelings?
GW: The reason that in this book I chose the librarian, Ms. Scott to be such a vital character is because for me as a kid, one of my safe spaces was the library. And that can be true for a lot of children. It was one of the first places where I could exercise my independence. I could pick out what I wanted to read and what I wanted to learn. The fact that I got to pick and read things that my parents wouldn’t have necessarily let me read, was also important to my development and made me feel more confident and independent. So public libraries really represent that safe space and a lot of my life I’ve been trying to get back to that feeling of being in a safe space.
I was a competitive gymnast growing up and that competitiveness and being in an athletic atmosphere that was so high-stress made me feel like my emotions were bad or that I couldn’t show any weakness. I took a lot of pride in hiding my emotions, or not needing emotional help for a very long time. I didn’t realize that until my sophomore year of college. I remember asking myself “What do I enjoy doing? What do I like doing? What do I have fun doing?” I had no answer because my life for so long had been about what needed to get done and being the best at that that I entirely lost track of what I liked to do and how I felt about it. Since that point, my life has been about getting back to that childlike embrace of my emotions and learning how to play again. Learning how to play and learning about how to follow our instincts and emotions is another thing that’s taught out of us. One of the things I most admire about children is their ability to embrace emotions. We’re told there are things that are warranted and unwarranted when it comes to crying and being upset; kids don’t necessarily feel that.
I think about a Mariame Kaba quote, “Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” And I think that includes working through your emotions. I have this little whiteboard in my room and I wrote on it a little message to myself, “It’s good to need other people.” It’s really easy to forget that and part of the adultification process, is thinking you can handle everything. In this book, I wanted to show that part of being in a safe space is needing other people. In order to make a change, we need other people. In order to healthily process our emotions, we need other people. That’s still something that I’m trying to embrace and kind of create safe spaces for myself and lean into them where they do exist.
KM: I appreciate that the book introduces readers to ancestors and historical figures who contributed so much to the landscape of Black American existence and creative output that they otherwise may not have encountered like Ida B. Wells and Gwendolyn Brooks, and especially Marsha P. Johnson. How did you choose who to feature? What was your first encounter learning about them?
GW: It was harder to choose who not to include than find people to include because there were so many people I learned about later in life who I did not learn about in school. Or until college, really. It was a moment of introspection. I said, who are people throughout my life who would have changed my life if I learned about them sooner? Or who were really influential to me who I never heard about or learned from school or had to learn about other adults in my life or someplace else. For example, I included Gwendolyn Brooks because that’s who I’m named after. She’s my mom’s favorite poet. I had a book of her poetry as a kid. I had a poem of hers on my wall. But I never learned about her in school. I didn’t learn about Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative until very late in college. I wanted to choose people who contributed to a very wide range of Black American existence.
I also wanted to include people who kids might learn a different story about. When they’re introduced to Fannie Lou Hamer, it’s typically in terms of voting but not about farming which is a great jumping-off point when thinking about Black relationships to land. If people are lucky enough to learn about Marsha P. Johnson as a kid they might learn about her involvement at Stonewall but not about S.T.A.R. and the amazing youth work that she did. I wanted to include the Combahee River Collective because their statement is by far the most influential Black feminist statement I’ve ever read and one of the most influential to my own politics. And I wanted to show kids the power and potential of Black women gathering in groups rather than being marginal to another movement that they might learn about.
These are all people that if I had learned about them way earlier, it would have changed my life. It would have changed how I thought about the world, how I thought about myself, how I organized, and how I thought about my community. If there’s even one kid who gets to learn about these people earlier or who is introduced to someone like June Jordan in college and says “Oh, I think she was in a picture book I read when I was little,” that would be a huge win.
KM: Black Women Radicals had a summit over the summer and our MC, Kwyn said something that made everyone in the room pause, and truly think about our education in the U.S.. She said something about how her education had been colonized and I still can’t stop thinking about that because it’s so true. When we’re in class as kids and we’re learning about Black history, as if the only time we can learn about it is in February, it’s always the same regurgitated information. It’s always Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. We don’t learn about the women, like Irene Morgan and Claudette Colvin who came before Rosa Parks but were deemed indecent or lacking in respectability so they weren’t utilized as figures to move forward the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. We don’t learn about the men who fought alongside MLK because they were gay, like Bayard Rustin. Our education was and continues to be colonized. We don’t get to learn about our own history unless we seek it out ourselves or in settings like university. It makes you question if I had known about these people before, who knows who I could have been?
GW: I very much feel similarly. There’s a whole different me out there who learned about all these people earlier and became a much more confident, outspoken person. I feel like part of becoming an adult and learning about all these people later is also mourning for that person and mourning that childhood you could have had had you learned this earlier. And as you said, we’re seeing a lot of this in the news. I’m really intentional about calling book banning violence, a form of violence. I think that being able to see other people put words to what you’re feeling before you have the ability to do that is really lifesaving in a way that people don’t necessarily realize or acknowledge. Every kid has a right to that. Every kid has a right to be able to find themselves somewhere. And to take that away really is a form of violence. It isn’t just “not nice” or taking diversity away from kids.
Picture from Gwendolyn Wallace’s book, THE LIGHT SHE FEELS INSIDE. The picture is an ode to the Combahee River Collective, a Black lesbian feminist socialist organization active in Boston, Massachusetts from 1974 to 1980. Pictures by Olivia Duchess.
KM: It’s also not just violent against Black children, but violence against all children. How are kids supposed to learn about other experiences that they themselves will never experience if they’re not reading these books? If a White kid or a Latin American kid is not learning about this, then they may grow up and think that the marginalized experiences of Black Americans are exaggerated or false. They would only be able to view the world through their own lived experiences.
GW: It’s also good, healthy, and important to learn to understand our own thought process, and understand why we think what we think. And you can’t do that if you don’t see experiences and opinions different from yours. Part of becoming a confident adult is knowing why you think what you think and developing those values. You can’t do that if you’re only reading the same thing from the same people over and over again. I think book banning is violence against everyone. It’s violence against children and violence against adults.
KM: There’s a page that shows Maya and her parents sitting at the kitchen table talking about the people she comes from. This scene brings to mind Carrie Mae Weems’ photo series, The Kitchen Table Series, and its focus on this space in which many familial interactions occur. What is the meaning of the kitchen table for you?
GW: I read this question and I love that connection so much because I actually have a framed picture from that series, but I had never thought about that. It was also lovely that you made that connection because my other book Joy Takes Root, has a kitchen table scene as well. After the main character and her grandma are done gardening for the day they go and sit at the kitchen table, and have some tea and cookies. I didn’t realize this theme in my books, so I’m grateful that you brought that up.
To me, there’s something about a kitchen table and sitting around it that feels reflective. It’s where the world stops for a minute. And gathering around food is such an important part of being Black and being a part of the diaspora. I also see kitchen tables as a place for sharing, whether it’s exchanging family stories at Thanksgiving and learning about your history, or when I’m with my family on Tuesday night and we’re planning for the week ahead. I know that everybody doesn’t necessarily have a great relationship with the kitchen table but to me it feels like an important place to slow down, to reflect on your life, to gather, to share with your family. That’s the purpose it serves in both of my books. It feels like a place of inheritance. In this case, Maya sits at the kitchen table with her parents learning about what she has inherited and her bigger role in her family.
“As radical people, thinking about how we can incorporate children into our movements is really important; seeing them not as property but as people who have just as much to teach us as we have to teach them. As adults, if we can talk to children, if we can truly be in community with children, and see them as collaborators, that’s the best we can do.”
KM: There’s a line in the book that I can’t stop thinking about, “But they know they do not glow alone.” I thought it was a beautiful reminder of the multitudes that exist within Black girls, the importance of celebrating that, and again, the importance of community.
GW: I think this line speaks to community in a different way because it talks about a community that crosses space and time. One of the reasons I love intergenerational relationships is because it makes me realize that I’m not alone and I‘m part of a long struggle which makes that burden of realizing everything that is wrong with the world feel lighter. There’s this really lovely quote from Audre Lorde in The Cancer Journals, “I found that battling despair is recognizing the enemy outside and the enemy within and knowing that my work is part of a continuum of women’s work. Of reclaiming this earth and our power and knowing that this work did not begin with my birth and nor will it not end with my death.” There’s so much power in that.
When you’re a kid, you’re experiencing so many new emotions for the very first time. As a kid, I found myself asking a lot, “I wonder if anyone else has ever felt like this in the history of the world.” To hear that someone does is lifesaving. It takes you from a world that feels like it only exists in your head and puts you in place in the world outside your head and I think that’s really centering to realize that the work you’re doing is just part of a very long struggle. And even if you don’t finish or you don’t make the change that you were hoping to, someone who looks just like you will pick it back up when they learn the same lessons and that’s part of being in community. Being in community with people is not just about who is around you, but also the lineage that you come from and the legacy that you’re leaving to the wider struggle for Black liberation.
KM: There’s a page that features Maya and her friends asking one another questions as they are glowing together. I wanted to ask you a couple of them. The first one is “Why doesn’t everyone have everything they need?”
GW: These questions are all a direct nod to the abolitionist movement because I think these are all really important questions that a lot of activists like Mariame Kaba and many others were urging people to ask in 2020 and far before that. The reason I asked this one, is it’s important for kids to learn that they don’t have to accept things as they are. You were talking about how our education is colonized. School systems and the way in which we teach children are also part of the legacy of colonization. And part of that legacy is teaching kids that this is how the world is and there’s nothing you can do about it.
I got my very first time out from my neighbor’s mom because I was asking too many questions and annoying her. I think about that moment a lot because that’s an example of how you create kids who don’t question the world around them, don’t think they can change things, and think nothing is worth changing. I think for kids like those young girls who were running the restaurant to stop and not just say they’ve been to restaurants and at the end they give you a bill so that’s what we’re going to do in ours but to question why food costs money, is a really important step to remind children to keep asking why.
KM: I like how you phrased it, that we’re told this is just the way things are. I’m sure, even as adults, we’ve both encountered people who look at things that need to be changed and they respond with “What’s the point?” That complacency was taught to us so that we wouldn’t ask questions as to why this thing that’s wrong needs to be changed. As if what we think or what we can do can’t possibly change it. We’re supposed to remain cogs in the machine and give and give to this machinery that we belong to and there’s nothing we can do to change it.
GW: I very much agree and I think that so much of education is learning about American values and what it means to be an American and all the victories of America, but intentionally very little about the people who make up America. What this creates is an idea of these overarching systems and values that are so far beyond you that you just kind of live within. There’s purposefully less recognition that everything bad you experience was created by a person or a group of people and as such, can be removed by a person or a group of people. The question I posed was a way to help children start thinking about hierarchy even if they are getting messaging in school that there’s nothing they can do about any of the issues in our society.
“One of the reasons I love intergenerational relationships is because it makes me realize that I’m not alone and I‘m part of a long struggle which makes that burden of realizing everything that is wrong with the world feel lighter.”
KM: How do we take care of one another?
GW: This is one of the hardest questions. This is the question that every organizing space that I’ve ever been a part of asks. I don’t think there’s just one answer to this. But I think we would all do better if we asked the people we’re in community with how they would like to be taken care of rather than assume that everyone wants to be taken care of the way we do. For me, I want to feel listened to, I want to feel like there’s a space for me to grow, learn, and feel safe. As well, we should all know how to answer that for ourselves. What does it feel like when we are taken care of?
As a kid, I was so used to asking questions of other people that I wasn’t necessarily asking these questions of myself. But I think it gives you a lot of power when you ask yourself how do I like to be taken care of? What does a good relationship feel like to me? What does a safe space feel like for me? Because that gives you the blueprint to start creating it in your life. In movement spaces when we get so caught up in the struggle and all these issues that we have to face, it can feel very out of body and it’s important that even when you are thinking about how to change the world you turn back to yourself. Abolition, liberation, and freedom aren’t just practiced around us, they’re also practiced in the relationships we foster. We should all ask each other and ourselves that question because that’s the core of all these things. Whether we’re taking down institutions or arguing with a friend, the question is always how we’re taking care of each other.
KM: Do you think that the fact that throughout history, there’s been this expectation of women, especially Black women to take care of everyone else, that we’re supposed to put ourselves last because our duty and role to society is to take care of everyone else is one of the reasons that we’re so unable and sometimes unwilling to ask or put forth ways we need to be taken care of? Or why we have such a difficult time answering that question of what do we need to be taken care of?
GW: Absolutely. I personally struggle so much to ask for help or struggle to say I need a break or need to be taken care of. A lot of that is just being a Black woman in America and in the world. You’re always expected to be the one caring for other people. I think children’s classrooms are such a lovely place to think about care. I’ve been a part of a lot of classrooms where the first day of class you collectively come up with a list of rules you want your classroom to live by for the year. The things kids come up with are so beautiful. In one classroom, they came up with “Be careful with our bodies.” That’s such a lovely sentiment and can be blown up and scaled to so many different things but I think again, it goes back to those values we learned as a child. How do you take care of your body?
Sometimes being a part of the movement is getting back to the little things, like asking your friend whether they’ve eaten or had something to drink. I know I struggle to eat or drink when I’m really stressed or when I’m feeling the burden of the world really heavily. And so there are these huge questions, but I think questions of care for ourselves and each other are also questions that deserve equal attention.
You can purchase The Light She Feels Inside from Sourcebooks here.
About the Author: Karla Méndez is an arts and culture writer whose work examines the histories of Black and Latin American women and their representations within visual art, literature, poetry, and performance. She is interested in how women put forth representations of themselves that are accurately representative of their expansiveness and how they use these avenues to engage with topics of identity, gender, race, and the female body. Ultimately, her work seeks to explore and reinstate forgotten and ignored histories as a site of care for ourselves and our communities.
She is the lead columnist of Black Feminist Histories and Social Movements, a column for the advocacy organization Black Women Radicals. She is a contributor for the Boston Art Review and Elephant Magazine and her work has appeared in the Brown Art Review and Ampersand: An American Studies Journal.