A memoir in progress, and essays from the city that made me. The origin and the voice behind the work.
I was formed in the exception — a Northern Liberties block where Puerto Rican, Irish, Polish, Mongolian, German, Czech, Indian, Mexican, and African American families shared the same rowhouses, before the country had a word for it.
My life's work has been making the exception the rule. This is the place those convictions come from — told plainly, and whole.
On independence, the document, and the woman who believed in both.
Read the essayThe paper was never meant for us.
A short history of a head covering, and the double standard we built around it.
Read the essayThe difference was never the cloth. It is who is underneath it.
The long spine — a girl fifteen minutes from the Liberty Bell, and a city that taught her what to remember and what to leave out.
In progressShorter pieces drawn from the same well — history, belonging, and the structures hidden inside ordinary things.
Growing collectionPhiladelphia as teacher — brotherly love and its contradictions, the music, the blocks, the founding myths held in two hands at once.
OngoingPhilly Baby is the origin and the voice. The practice it grew into — equity strategy and leadership — lives at Fierce Buddha Consulting.
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