danika always knew she loved language and storytelling. she was a child of the public library lounging for hours leafing through texts and even skipped class in high school to stay in the school library, reading the autobiographies of early 20th century figures of black history.

reading maya angelou’s autobiographical series that begins with the seminal work ‘i know why the caged bird sings’ chartered her journey to become a writer and ignited a deep curiosity about personal histories and narrative storytelling.

her solo travel across the world has been a needle threading together the fruits of self excavation, the transformative power of community, and has contextualized beloved literary works like ‘wayward lives, beautiful experiments’ by saidiya hartman.