This is a collection of works I’ve pulled together over the last couple of years—poems, articles, and designs that feel like pieces of myself. Two articles, five poems, and a mix of art for you to wander through. It’s all packed into 28 pages, a half-page zine, so 14 sheets to print, fold, and hold. I call it Sacrifice Zone because I’m from Louisiana. And if you’re from Louisiana, you’re already marked. Denied personhood in a way. You live in a sacrifice zone.

What’s a sacrifice zone? It’s a place the EPA has declared so saturated with toxins, with the very things that twist life—birth defects, cancer, untold suffering—that it's been sacrificed. To capitalism, to industry. That’s where I’m from, the traditional lands of the Caddo people. Louisiana, a place written off before it had a chance to scream. A place of poverty, of less-than, where escape feels like a dream. But even in this zone of rot, we are home to art. One of the fiercest cultural engines in the country, and I’m proud of that.

Jazz musicians, hip-hop artists, storytellers, street artists, culture creators—we keep pushing the world forward, even as they write us off. From the land where we are born dead, I bring you Sacrifice Zone.