I am an egungun (ancestral) priest in the Yoruba Orisa tradition, Black Studies practitioner, Reiki Master, healer, poet, writer, teacher, and birth doula. Through literature, creative writing, and collaborative community projects, I explore how unresolved ancestral emotions related to the Middle Passage manifest in the lives of descendants and ways in which these emotions and the subsequent woundings can be healed. I am committed to helping communities heal from a range of traumas. This often takes the form of collaborative projects that combine history, narrative, creative arts, and rituals grounded in a community's "knowing". It also means making my own process and experiences available to my communities, especially when it is possible to demonstrate what I do as sites for dynamic praxis. To accomplish this, I continue to create. I am the author of three poetry chapbooks, including Wishful Thinking and Still Breathing. My poems have been anthologized in Gathering Ground, Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the 21st Century, Knowing Stones: Poems of Exotic Places, I Feel A Little Jumpy Around You, and Catch the Fire, Jane’s Stories, Lorraine and James, and rhino. Excerpts of my memory work, The Ariran’s Last Life, have been performed at the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre, and published in Best African American Fiction 2010, The Kenyon Review, Warpland, Margin Magazine, and Let Spirit Speak! (SUNY Press). Excerpts from my memoir, Arroyo, which details my leg of the Middle Passage Voyage with Captain Bill Pinkney, have been published in nocturnes. Recent interviews about that trip can be found on Bloomington Public Radio (WFHB). Sankofa in Action, my community healing process, has been published in Black Diaspora Review (Indiana University, Spring 2011), a special issue I was invited to co-edit with Professor Valerie Grim. I am also co-editor of a chapbook of narratives by immigrant women published by Jane’s Stories Press (with Shobha Sharma, 2012) and Jane’s Stories III: Women Writing Across Boundaries (with Glenda Bailey-Mershon, 2006). I am a Cave Canem Fellow, and have received other writing fellowships from Norcroft, Sacatar (Brasil), and Ragdale foundations. Finally, I served as poet and ritualist-in- residence for the UNESCO-Transatlantic Slave Trade Route-USA Project for 7 years, and am the creator of The Arroyo Healing Network.