My first creative nonfiction book project is an (auto)biography of my illiterate mother and a meditation on the lived experience of Blackness and enslavement in modern Brazil. At the age of seven, my mother was sold into slavery by her white foster sister. It was 1968—eighty years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil and four years into the anti-communist coup d’état, during the month in which the military overruled the Constitution by decree. By weaving in extensive archival research and interviews, the book narrates our journey to Minas Gerais—where she was born and where German and Swiss colonization have historically contributed to the persistence of Black forced labor—and Bahia—the Blackest state in Brazil, where she was enslaved for years—to investigate why the family that bought her has never been brought to justice. It also narrates my grandmother’s journey to find her missing daughter amidst one of the darkest moments in Brazilian history.

I have been selected by Yaddo (where I held the Abigail Angell Canfield and Cass Canfield Jr. Residency), the Blue Mountain Center, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the 2025 Tin House Autumn Online Workshop, and the 100th Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference to work on this project. I have also offered craft seminars and masterclasses based on it at the UEA Creative Writing Course, Tin House, The Center for Fiction, The Work Room (The Shipman Agency), The Berlin Writers’ Workshop, Corporeal Writing, and the Writing Workshops, among others. Kirkus Reviews has featured one of these seminars, “Writing And/As/About Resistance,” as one out of six “Writing Retreats to Inspire You in 2024.”

As an undergraduate student, two of my short story collections (crônicas) were recognized by the Nascente Book Award of the University of São Paulo: I was a finalist in 2009 (The Telegraphs) and awarded a honorable mention in 2010 (Concerning the Yanomami).

I have served and currently serve as a development editor for works at the intersection of autobiography, history, and politics, including memoirs, novels, dissertations, academic articles, and book proposals. I am an alumnus of the Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop and have served as an Assistant Editor at Cultures of Vigilance and Review of Democracy.

As a teacher of creative writing, I have recently taught craft seminars on themes such as “Experiments with Autobiographical Writing,” “Meaning and Depth: Writing Beyond the Dominant Gaze,” “The First Five Pages,” “We All Have Family Stories to Tell,” “What Is Autofiction?,” “Writing And/As/About Resistance,” “Writing with Annie Ernaux,” “Writing with Frantz Fanon,” and “Writing with James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.”

I talk about my teaching style and projects in this interview with Blake Kimsey and in this newsletter of the Writing Co-Lab.

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