Bezel is my digital portfolio. It gathers framing materials—work samples, photos, footage, and notes—around my five published works: I Don't Like the Blues (2020), We Travel (2020), We Dance (2021), Ghosts of Segregation (2024), and We Make (2025).
A love story, that moves.
Excerpt from an essay originally published in Gravy, the magazine of the Southern Foodways Alliance.
Bridging the genres of ethnopoetry and as-told-to biography, We Dance follows Tanya Wideman-Davis and her partner Thaddeus Davis—both professional dancers—as they make a shared life from their love of each other and as they yearn to live it as lively and lightly as they move. The Wideman Davis Dance story is also a food story, as so much of their love was crystallized while searching for, preparing, eating, not liking, loving, turning away from, and remembering this dish or that dessert. A pound cake. A sweet potato pie. A savory dinner with salmon and rice.
Many of the words you read belong to Tanya and Thaddeus (or their family members). They were recorded over several conversations spanning about two months in the summer of 2021. The words that do not belong to Tanya and Thaddeus are sampled from and inspired by Black art makers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Zandria Robinson, and Lorna Simpson. In this way, We Dance is also a meditation on the immensity of Black culture and the places, histories, memories, and moves that make Black life.
Spin
Tanya's Dance
Credits