Personal tension-filled experiences infuse my work, informing the characters and the conflict in my stories. I was born literally at the dawn of Mississippi’s post-Jim Crow experiment and into a setting that was beset with unspoken but aggressively enforced boundaries and conventions. Whether because my father was Catholic and my mother was Baptist, or because I lived neither in a white nor a black community, or because of countless other experiences, I grew especially attentive to those boundaries and conventions and often felt minimized and marginalized by them. The tensions continued into my adulthood as one of few Black officers on an aircraft carrier with hundreds of Black enlisted men, or as a member of the U.S. military in the international expat community that embraced me, or as a Black man from a rural background living in an urban setting. Being on the margins, constantly required to codeswitch, never quite able to be myself, I took to writing as a way of making a space for myself and the others I knew had to be out there with experiences similar to mine.