Activist, Strategist, and Aspiring Debut Novelist
I write about social movements, public policy, and human rights but my first passion was always fiction. For more than 5 years, I have been working on a novel that I hope to soon publish and share with readers. I am in the process of querying agents in search of representation.
My novel, Bank of the Underworld, was born when I was awarded a fiction fellowship with Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) under the guidance of novelist Tayari Jones. It is inspired by my experiences in eclectic music scenes, and the role music plays in my relationships with family and friends. It is told from the perspective of Capshaw Riggins, a young, misfit black man from Brooklyn who has graduated from Columbia University with a large debt and an uncertain future. Capshaw has a compulsive desire to search for his life purpose in the footsteps of his unconventional artist father, Ben, who he witnessed die in a horrific subway accident as a teenager.
Capshaw is interested in art but his mother, Sharon, pressures him to make sensible use of his Ivy League education. He settles on music journalism as a compromise career. To this end, Capshaw braves the grief and guilt of confronting his father’s memory by seeking out stories from the music Ben loved, and his morbid drawings inspired by heavy metal themes and death.
Capshaw develops an obsessive fascination with a multiethnic underground punk, metal and horror rap 1990s record label that his father admired called Bank of the Underworld. The founders, Manny Pell-Baker, Noah Simon, and Jason Yee had a conflict that is the subject of much speculation among their cult of fans. They are reportedly no longer in touch. Capshaw hopes that finding them, uncovering the source of their rift, and bringing them back together will offer him a story that will launch his journalism career, and help him reconcile Ben’s unfulfilled dreams of working with them.
To channel some of my literary heroes, Bank of the Underworld, is as if Paul Beatty and Colson Whitehead teamed up to write a mash-up of Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad at a writer’s retreat hosted by Ozzy Osbourne. It explores the topics of family, identity, race, age, and gender, and the joys and challenges of friendships that leap across those boundaries. Moreover, the novel is a memento mori, an artistic expression of death as a muse, reminding humankind to live our best lives. Contemplation of death as a source for motivation feels particularly poignant in the uncertain times we are in, and the unresolved grief and thoughts of dying that many are grappling with.