December 2025
Our world is growing increasingly hostile and dystopian.
There’s much poverty, hurt, suffering and death everywhere. In our actions as humans, we destroy ourselves and each other, until climate change eventually gets us.
I can only be grateful for where life has taken me this past year.
Who would believe there was a point in my life where I didn’t have five dollars to buy a café latte, and I was pawning jewelry to pay water and electricity bills? It’s a bleakness that continues to haunt me—the terror and memory of it, the sense that I was alone and that I might not pull out right. But I wasn’t alone. And I lived through it, emerging stronger in ways that startle me.
In my application for the Otherwise Fellowship, I shared that I was at a crucial point in building my literary career and wanted to pursue it full time. I had parted ways with a literary agent I had believed in but grown disillusioned with—we were never a good fit, and that’s okay to accept. With or without an agent, I was increasingly visible globally, representing Africa and Australia. I stated in the application that I was working on a new collection of short stories, Black Dingo, where the literary strange unravels in genre bending Afro-irreal tales of longing and belonging, unlimited futures, queerness and sexuality, a collision of worlds and everything in between, in hues of shadow and light.
I spoke about how I use storytelling to help me and the reader explore our place in the universe, ask fundamental philosophical problems, interrogate the past and learn from it, contemplate our future. My speculative fiction offers a safe way to explore a different kind of story that encourages a response in fiction in stories of diversity and hope, possibility and probability, and sometimes they are cautionary tales.
It has been a whirlwind since I was awarded the 2024 Otherwise Fellowship in February 2025—I offer my deepest thanks to the Otherwise Motherboard, Fellowship Committee. This astounding recognition helped cast me on the spotlight and I found myself being named the 2025 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award recipient in May.
In June, I was awarded the 2025 Locus Award for Best Non-Fiction for my edited anthology Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction by Bloomsbury Academic, which also won the 2025 Ignyte Award for Outstanding Creative Nonfiction in October.
In September, I released two books—NOVIC, a novelette and The Nga’phandileh Whisperer, a novella set in the Afrocentric Sauútiverse. Now, in 2026, I have two books, including Black Dingo that is supported by the Otherwise Fellowship, and Crimson in Quietus, the very first novel in the Sauútiverse!
Life has not stopped. I am thankful to the community that continues to give and reward me in different ways. And I try to give back in whichever way. I recently accepted an ongoing Co-Chair role in public liaison for the Bram Stoker Awards. I am also judging the Australian Shadows Awards in the Poetry category, and I’m currently the chair of the jury for the 2025 Otherwise Awards.
As I continue inner and outer focus on gender-expansive creative works in my own writing and in the art and text of others, I feel tremendously exhilarated to be reading all the possible candidates for the 2025 Otherwise Award.
Black Dingo, sponsored by the Otherwise Fellowship, will be published in October 2026 by Flame Tree Publishing and is set to feature a foreword by Kiini Ibura Salaam for which I am truly honored.