Explore my impact,
consider it a non-exhaustive offering.
Conference Papers & Presentations
Interdisciplinary Storytelling: Using All We’ve Got - Workshop
Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed, Omaha, NE - 2025
Authors: Hess Stinson and Matthew Lewis
Grantmaking for Trans Aliveness: Funding the Immeasurable with Dignity - Presentation
PEAK Grantmaking 2025 Annual Convening, New Orleans, LA - 2025
(Accepted/Unable to attend)
Authors: Dominique Morgan, Hess Stinson, dr. monique liston and Shavonda Sisson
They Looked to the Water: An Ancestor Forward Approach to Commemorating the Chancellor’s Point Burying Ground - Paper
Society for Historical Archaeology: 2025 Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, New Orleans, LA - 2025
Authors: Hess Stinson and Dr. Travis Parno
Tenets of Ritual Transformation in African American Performance and Hoodoo Texts - Paper
WIlkes University Maslow Family Graduate Creative Writing Program, MFA Thesis Defense, Wilkes-Barre, PA - 2025
Author: Hess Stinson
Eroding Gods: Shifts in Place-Based Spirituality Due to Climate Change - Paper
American Folklore Society Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM - 2024
Author: Hess Love
All Saints Day, The Hoodoo Way: Honoring the Dead in the Northern Hemisphere - Presentation
Festival Culture Research and Education (FCRE) Annual International Symposium on Festival Culture, Virtual. - 2023
Authors: Hess Love and Toya Smith
Hoodoo Disability Narratives: Exploring the Pain Body in a Carceral Society - Presentation
African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association Conference, Charlotte, NC - 2023
Authors: Hess Stinson and Dr. Roman B. Johnson
Whose House? Gaining Entry into the Unwell Dwelling in NANNY, HIS HOUSE, and BELOVED - Presentation
Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA) Summer Salon, Virtual - 2023
Authors: Hess Love and Julia Mallory
Magic and Mourning: Special Specters on Screen in the Films Beloved, His House, and Nanny - Presentation
National Black Writers Conference, Scholarly Program
Diasporic Visions: A Celebration of Black Speculative Fiction, New York, NY/Virtual - 2023
Authors: Hess Love and Julia Mallory
Residencies & Fellowships
Lab 410 at Baltimore Center Stage Playwright in Residence
The Crossroads Project - Princeton University Community Stories Fellow
Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA)
Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference
Ionion Center for the Arts and Culture - Kefalonia, Greece
Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing
Tin House
Kimbilio for Black Fiction
Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA)
Roots. Wounds. Words
Scribente Maternum at Lucille Clifton House
Obsidian Foundation
Collaborations and Field Work
National Park Service: Chesapeake Gateways
National Endowment for the Humanities
Organization of American Historians
Women of the World Poetry Slam
Institute of Museum and Library Services
Love on Black Women
Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
River and South Literary Magazine
Awards, Grants & Support
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The AFS Cultural Diversity Committee is proud to announce the recipients of the inaugural Gerald L. Davis Presence Pathway Award. The Project Pathway provides funding for projects that participate in community scholarship in action, and that keep communities connected, whole, and active.
In memory of folklorist Gerald L. Davis and in partnership with the AFS Cultural Diversity Committee (CDC), the American Folklore Society provides a limited number of grants to foster the participation, inclusion, and affirmation of persons of color who are invested in community development. Gerald L. Davis was a celebrated folklorist, scholar, and activist whose work centered around the study of African American expressive culture and building African American and African communities and grounded in cultural exchange, research, and development.
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Black Joy is honoring those that we would not be without — the storytellers, the memory keepers, the collectives that brought us joy. The first annual Black Joy awards is eight categories, 26 nominees and endless Black abundance.
Monumental memory-keepers: Hess Love and Andrea Walls
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Books & Publications
Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture
By Sherronda J. Brown
Foreword by Hess Love
Afterword by Grace B Freedom
Citations and Sightings
(The other constellations that my words and work are part of.)
Breastfeeding Medicine and Black History Month: Studies on the African American Experience and Breastfeeding
By Arthur I Eidelman, MD
Breastfeeding Medicine Vol 16. No. 2
Mothers in the Wake of Slavery: The Im/possibility of Motherhood in Post-1980 African American Women's Prose
By Lénárt-Muszka Zsuzsanna, PhD
Debreceni Egyetem (University of Debrecen. Debrecen, Hungary)
(Un)Mapping trajectories of fatness: a critical account of fat studies’ origin story and the reproduction of fat (white) normativity
By Samantha Rose Ruth Zerafa
Critical and Radical Social Work An international journal
“No Estas Sola!”: Reclaiming Space & Place Through Transformational Solidarity & Coalitional Healing
By Jazmin N. Munoz
University of Texas at San Antonio
Department of Bicultural Bilingual Studies
Responsive Wild: Rediscovering, Redefining, and Realigning
By Kristina Harris, MFA
University of Maryland, College Park
Crystal U. Davis School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies
Ray of Light: Standpoint Theory, Fat Studies, and a New Fat Ethics
By Cat Pausé
Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society Vol 9. No. 2
“You Deserve, Baby!”: Spiritual Co-creation, Black Witches, and Feminism
By Marcelittle Failla, PhD
The Witch Studies Reader, Duke University Press
“The Hoodoo You Knew”: An Afrocentric (Re)Location of Conjure and Hoodoo Cosmology
By Justice Ifafunmilayo Isaacs, PhD
Temple University
Africology and African American Studies Department
Sounding Resistance: The Soundscapes of Political Witchcrafting and Magical Protest in the United States, 1848-2021
By Hannah Elise Geerlings
Florida State University, College of Music