PhD, NTP, and Founder of Roots and Rituals

My path to nutritional therapy and birthwork began with a curiosity about the stories we tell ourselves and the lived reality of the bodies we inhabit. Deeply influenced by the service-driven Black educators I learned from at Howard University, I went on to earn a PhD in Literature from Johns Hopkins University, intending to spend my life in the classroom. However, a series of transformative events redirected my purpose: a painful inflammatory disorder I healed through diet and rest, my daughter’s natural home birth and my difficult postpartum experience, and a desperate search for healing when she later developed severe eczema.

These experiences taught me that while our culture often overlooks the wellbeing of our caregivers, our biology does not. The health of our caregivers profoundly impacts the wellbeing of our families, communities, and descendants. Ultimately it was the wisdom of Sobonfu and Malidoma Patrice Somé who helped me see that when it comes to our health, the natural world and our cultural rituals are inseparable.

I approach birthwork, nutrition, and ritual care as parts of the same sacred whole:

• Birth is the process of life entering this world.

• Roots are the biological and ancestral foundations that sustain us.

• Rituals are the practices that care for the lives that have joined us.

Today, my family and I split our time between Brooklyn and our Roots and Rituals Farm, bridging the city and the soil. As a Nutritionist, Educator, and Birthworker, my mission is to care for the ones who carry the world. I integrate nutritional therapy, fertility education, childbirth education, postpartum doula support, and hypnobirthing to help you rebuild your reserves and honor the sacred responsibility of caring for life. To tend to the maternal journey is to care for our ancestors and our descendants alike.