My father and I always argue about religion.

When I am a junior in high school, I take a course called Advanced Acting, held in a dank, basement-level classroom that doubles as our black-box theatre. I love to act.

I spent my undergraduate years at Ithaca College in central New York, a liberal arts school famous for its state-of-the-art music conservatory.

I haven’t written because I don’t know
how to write about New Orleans.
Riding through an empty French Quarter
with a white man in a white pick-up truck,

When I am a toddler, a child, a tween, a teen and ayoung adult, I am called an ancestral soul, a "ti granmoun," a little old person. Adults study me and decidethat I am wise beyond my years, mature for my age, emotionally ripe.

On June 18, 2007, 10 African-American teenagers gang-raped and tortured a Haitian woman in southern Florida in the notoriously dangerous Dunbar Village

I was called a "Negro" in the year 2008.

One of my grandaunts married her rapist. She was a teenager in Haiti and a virgin before the assault.