Essays

The Masters Review, Spring 2025

Early in my MFA program, a fellow student advised me not to discuss my children with the director. She’d overheard me telling him about the soccer camp or the Shakespeare camp or the “dad camp” they were attending while I was at my first residency and admonished me. “He’ll never take you seriously as a writer if your whole identity is mother.” I felt scolded, and assumed she knew what she was talking about. She was older than I was, her children older than mine, she was published and therefore must know this world I was trying to enter. So I listened. I never spoke to the director about my children again.

Electric Lit, Spring 2024

“Did you hear about Ralph Yarl?” I ask George, my 17-year-old Black son on Tuesday night, five days after a white man in Missouri shot the 16-year-old Black child in the head and chest for knocking on his door; three days after a man in another state shot at a car that’d pulled into his driveway to turn around—20 year olds lost on their way to a party, and no cell service in those woods—killing the woman in the passenger seat; two days after a white student on my husband’s campus called in a shooter threat and my son and I had spent some of Sunday and Monday worrying—not for the life of his dad, whom we knew was unharmed, but for what it might be like to feel safe in this world again; the same day two cheerleaders in Texas were shot for mistakenly opening a car door in the dark, thinking it was their car. What has happened in this country that shooting at strangers has become our answer? What triggers our fears so deeply? Or is it that we’ve always been this scared and now just everyone has a gun?

Inside Higher Education, Winter 2023

As the director of the writing center at Williams College, I’ll admit to having reached out to a few writing center directors at other colleges in recent weeks with a message that said, more or less, “We’re toast.”

Solstice Literary Magazine, Summer 2022

We sit in a line on a bench in Washington Square Park, my first son, me, my second son. Suitcases flank us—two of us are headed to the train station and on back home. One of us will stay here in the city of his birth. I can’t hear their voices because what I’m thinking is that this is how it will be now, me visiting, leaving, visiting again. Him, always staying. We soak up a cool February sunshine, pretending we’re warmer than we are, and watch the parade before us. The park is the setting for so much and he wants us to see. He believes, perhaps, that I have not seen it before.

“Hey, man, you’re Black and white,” a Black homeless man approaches and announces to my first son. It’s as though he doesn’t see my second son. As though-at first-he doesn’t see me. I’d watched him beeline over here, eyes on my boy, and I spend these first seconds of our time with him wondering which surprised him when he finally arrived: my first son’s whiteness or his Blackness. I try to blaze into memory the order of the races as he gave them, pull out my phone to take a note so I won’t get it wrong later. I am certain, right here, that I am getting it wrong. Which race shook him?

Public Seminar, Summer 2020

Decades after Julia McKenzie Munemo’s father committed suicide, she learned that he had made his living writing interracial pornography under a pseudonym. A white woman and a mother of mixed-race sons, she hid the stack of her father’s old paperbacks from her Zimbabwean husband — and from herself — for more than a decade.

In The Book Keeper, the journey of finally reading those pulpy paperbacks set during slavery entwines with questions about Munemo’s father’s mental illness, the tale of her own love story, and her exploration of the fears she carries for her sons in a country where, as we continue to be reminded, black men aren’t safe jogging through their neighborhoods, 14-year-old black boys aren’t safe from police brutality, and unarmed black men and women continue to die at the hands of those tasked with protecting us.