“Beauty is not a state of being but a kind of belief, seeing past what is to what may be.”

- Kevin Young, The Grey Album

My storytelling is born out of growing up in a racially diverse impoverished rural Southern town where I, and the community at large, often felt misunderstood and neglected. I’ve devoted my life to facilitating, teaching, and creating diverse stories that reflect the whole of communities like mine that exist around the country and globe, and challenging hegemonic mainstream narratives in the process.

Within these stories about marginalized voices, I’m deeply curious about the cracks, crevices and silences of life, and how best to highlight the complexities of those stories with dignity, theatrical imagination and beauty to reveal something beyond what we expect to see. My body of work reaches for ambitious heights that seek to redefine how we engage with stories and communities through genre-bending, risk-taking, theatrically-bold writing that emphasizes the importance of telling a multitude of working-class stories.

Below is a monologue about the continual killings of unarmed Black Americans by police, and those who want to be police, and the complacency of white Americans.

The piece is performed by Brandon Jones