Bio

I am a child of immigrant parents from the Caribbean who came to the States well aware of the racial and economic challenges they would face. I graduated from Barnard College where I witnessed and participated in the student Take-Over at Columbia University that occurred in 1968. Those turbulent times of political activism have informed my world view. At Pratt Institute I majored in art education and graduating from there, I taught art in the New York City public school system.

In 1973 I met Miguel Algarín and joined with him as one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and worked with him building the Cafe until we both retired from its day-to-day management in 2011. In 1989 I received an M.A. in English with concentration in creative writing from NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Science. For 23 years I taught English at CUNY's Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Joe Papp produced my play White Sirens at the Public Theater. My writings have appeared in: The Iowa Review, Heresies Magazine, A Gathering of the Tribes, Long Shot, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Hoodoo 7. I am anthologized in: A Time to Stir: Columbia '68, Brown Sugar, Ordinary Women, Cayenne, Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. I wrote the introduction for Contact Sheet: a LightWorks monograph on photographer Tony Gleaton. With Miguel Algarín, I edited Action: The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Theater Festival. My novel Among Others was published by Crown Books. In 2025 the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture included my papers in their collection, and Granary Books published my work, You See What You See, a book of drawings and poems that Lost & Found: the CUNY Poetics Document Initiative reissued in 2026.