Sam (all pronouns) is a queer first-generation interdisciplinary Black Feminist literary storyteller and doctoral student in the Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Born in West Palm Beach, FL, Sam earned their BA with honors from Bates College (2023) in Africana Studies, where they explored the intersections between storytelling, disaster, and colonialism in their published thesis, “Colonialism as the Disaster: Retelling the Fight for Haitian Sovereignty.”
Grounded in Spiralism, Sam’s research interest lie in: Black (femme) liminality, nonlinearity, labor culture in relation to collective power, Vodun and ancestral worship as embodied practices, as well as social death and social resurrection as narrated within Haitian folklore as zonbification and dezonbification. Their current research explores the presence of Black potentiality within “zombielands”–spaces marked by (neo)colonial violence and the deathly consumption of Black flesh through economic and political exploitation–as a landscape for unweaving imperial disaster discourse and reimagining Haitian futurity as defined by pèpè Ayisyen.
When resting, Sam enjoys cooking spicy food, seeking bodies of water, spontaneous travel, and writing poetry and prose. In 2024, Sam was awarded the GrubStreet Emerging Writer Fellowship. Their short story “Ti Mama” will appear in Volume 39 of The Caribbean Writer (TCW).
