Hi, I’m Mia.
In 2020 I self-published my first book, Dream-Chasing From The Margins: A Memoir In Essays. For the past five years, I’ve been working on my second book, a researched inquiry into friendships between and among Black women. (Oh yes indeed!! You should definitely stay tuned in for this book.)
I now live in Mexico with my husband. In 2022 we sold our house and pretty much everything in it and made the move. Howard and I have been married for 20 years. The move to Mexico wildly disrupted our quiet, comfortable but boring way of life. It threw gasoline on pre-existing baby flames of tension in our marriage and we almost broke up a few times. Moving to Mexico turned out to be the thing we didn’t know we needed for individual emotional healing, and to feed ourselves a steady diet of self-love. We became more confident individuals and even better friends to each other as a result.
The person I was while still living in America could never have written the kind of book I envisioned for this second book I’m working on. I was too lost, too self-loathing, too easily overwhelmed. Back then I was too fucking scared to write into book pages some of our deeper truths as Black women—who we are, how we really get along, how amazing and beautiful we truly are, how broken we have been; and just how much fire in the belly many of us still carry due to American racism, misogyny, and misogynoir.
Living in Mexico has changed me so much. I feel freer than I’ve ever felt. I am still changing, still becoming the woman I was born to be. And I’m here, writing on Substack because I’m ready to let more people into my writing world and make reciprocal connections as my truer, more fearless, and more determined self.
A few extras:
- I grew up in Brooklyn, New York
- I used to live in Pennsylvania with my husband and two daughters
- I am a recovering alcoholic with 13 years of sobriety
- I had a brief career as a reporter for a small political newspaper in Albany, NY
- I was a social worker for 11 years