I’m so glad you found your way here.

Storytelling has always been part of how I understand the world. I grew up in Barbados listening to my grandmother, who was born in Panama in 1922, tell stories about her life, our family, and her own mother, who was born in Jamaica in the late 1800s. Through her, I learned that stories were never just entertainment, they were how we carried memory.

In my family, history traveled through words. It lived in the stories told around the table, in parables and old sayings, in recipes passed from one generation to the next, and in the Caribbean tales that could make you laugh, warn you, teach you, or remind you exactly who you were. Long before I thought of myself as a writer, I was learning what language could hold.

Through my grandmother, I inherited more than stories, I inherited a love of culture, language, Blackness, and the richness of knowing where you come from. I learned to take pride in our history, our traditions, our food, my skin, my hair, and in the many ways our stories survive because someone keeps telling them.

That is where my love of words began, listening to the people before me use language to remember, teach, entertain, and preserve. That inheritance continues to shape my writing and the work I choose to put into the world.

I want to make space for our experiences in all their forms, for stories that are joyful, complicated, funny, painful, ordinary, extraordinary, and entirely our own.

So while you’re here, stay awhile. Explore the books, read through the articles, and maybe you’ll find something that feels familiar, or something that makes you see the world a little differently.

Either way, I’m glad you’re here.

Welcome,

Nicole