This article is for my 2025 Center for Craft Archive Fellowship. I highlight how Black artists and crafters preserved and adapted ancestral natural-dyeing methods from the 18th to the 20th centuries as part of their cultural heritage.

Featured in Service95, this article explores how our homes can become reflections of our identities, values, and lived experiences by embracing meaningful objects, natural materials, and intentional design choices.

I wrote a chapter in Curating as Feminist Organizing. Buy the book here.

I was born on August 16, 1991 in San Francisco, California. At the time of my birth, Oakland—the first place I ever lived, was 43 percent Black. According to the last census in 2020, Oakland is now about 23 percent Black. But gentrification on this land started far earlier than the 21st century.

Read the full piece here.

According to the World Resources Institute Report on Deforestation and Agriculture, “cattle pasture now occupies some 45.1 million hectares (Mha) of land deforested between 2001 and 2015, accounting for 36 percent of all tree cover loss associated with agriculture during the time period.” This is the case across most of the tropical world where certain commodities such as rubber, cocoa, palm oil and leather are produced. However, in the maps World Resources Institute created, it is clear that the Amazon biome has the highest percentage of forest land replaced by cattle agriculture for the time period between 2001 to 2015.

Read the full article here.

The State of Waste in the Fashion Industry

The mainstream fashion industry’s supply chains are not linear but operate in an economy with a take, make, and waste production model. This model takes mass amounts of raw materials and releases carbon emissions into the atmosphere; uses exploited labor to make these materials into products; then those products are wasted and “thrown away,” usually to a landfill in a low-income community of color.

Read the full piece here.

Two years ago, I heard a young scholar named Kali Tambreé ask: “when they jumped from the slave ships, where do they go?” This is a response.

Some matter that ends up in the ocean settles to the sea floor as a form of sediment. Over time, this sediment becomes rock and may eventually—through pressure and temperature change— be pushed up above the surface again.

Read the full piece at Root Work Journal here.

For more than five years there has been a water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Meanwhile, in White Hall, Alabama, residents live with raw sewage because basic sanitation is not affordable.

Read the rest here.

An essay about my grandma’s home-making and Jamaican crafting traditions. Read it on Brookly Tweed’s blog.

Order Issue 03 of Shado to read my essay on the intersections between Black lives, the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change.

Buy Loam: Weaving New Worlds to read my essay “We Are the Weavers: Black Mermaids, Geography as Intervention, the Roots of Imagining”

Read: Part I - Reckoning with the Narrative and the Land, on Brooklyn Tweed’s blog for the launch of their new cotton-wool blend yarn Dapple. This blog focuses on some of the environmental effects of plantation slavery.

I wrote and performed an original poem created especially for the Fibershed 2019 Gala: The Practice of Belonging. The poem is entitled: In/Visible Hands.

In the summer of 1969 a banner hung over a set of condemned homes in what was then the predominantly black and brown Brookland neighborhood in Washington, D.C. It read, “White man’s roads through black men’s homes.”

Read the rest here.

“I know some of you are worried about the wall… Every problem we face is a fictitious wall that was created to divide us and separate.”

-Vandana Shiva

Read the full article here.

SB 100 Is Moving Cities in California Toward Zero-Emissions Futures

Turning the fight to save the environment into a fight for racial justice

A reflection on Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies biannual conference, Black Impossibility, and how important affirmation of life is during times like these. Read it on Medium.

Our hair is a map to freedom: What I learned about resistance from the “1st” free Black town in the Americas - San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia

Read here.

This year 46 local and international artists will be featured in the scaled-down 10th Berlin Biennale curated by the South African curator Gabi Ngcobo. Along with Yvette Mutumba, Nomaduma Rosa Masilela, Serubiri Moses and Thiago de Paula Souza, Ngcobo will present We Don’t Need Another Hero. 

Why they shoot us at home: Black people have no “safe space” is about Black geographies and how racialized violence does not heed the distinction between inner and outer geographies. Read it on Racebaitr.

Read the open letter in The Guardian - Opinion. 

Teju was commissioned by Recess Art in Brooklyn to write in tandem with Doreen Garner's Session Project "Invisible Man Tattoo." 

Read it here. 

This article was written in January 2018, inspired by my experience at #TechIntersections Conference.

Read it on Medium

Photo by Charles Magnuson on Unsplash

Published in Friktion, this piece is a reading and review of Tiphanie Yanique’s debut novel Land of Love and Drowning.

It was originally published in FRIKTION, a new magazine about sex, body, and culture. It aims to bridge the gap between gender research and the world outside the university walls. Its ambition is to become a serious alternative to a sometimes inappropriate Danish sexual and gender debate.

Read it here.

A digital chapbook produced from Teju’s time in nature while in Israel/Palestine in February of 2017.

“to be Black in nature is to be both a monument and a revelation. to consume less is both activism and ecological self-preservation. to travel is to look at yourself naked in the mirror. to discover, explore, and open up is to liberate deeply hidden pathologies.”

Download and read it for free here.

This article was published April 21, 2017 as a guest contributor on Afropunk.

Read it here