Inside the Mind - The Cunning Linguist

Growing up I was an Encyclopedia Brown, Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew kid — I just loved a good mystery. But the real fuel is my life. My father died two months before I was born, so I never met him, and death has been walking beside me since before I took my first step. That's why Death keeps showing up in my books — he's practically family at this point. And honestly? My wife once asked me why I keep writing books that sell little to nothing, and I couldn't answer her. Writing has always been my thing — poetry, rap, now novels. I have to be creating something to feel normal inside.

Freshman year of college, my English professor told me I was "quite a cunning linguist." I never forgot that line. When it came time to pick a pen name, it was the only one that ever made sense.

My mission. I write Newark — the neighborhoods, the people, the corners I grew up on — and I write it with love. The media only points a camera at Newark when somebody's bleeding, and that's a lie by omission. My books are my correction of the record. And I write Black stories from the inside, in voices people actually talk in, because that's the world I know.

It's a two-part Newark saga. In 1947, a six-year-old girl named Amanda McKie meets Death — and names him James. Part I follows that meeting; Part II follows Amanda and her family across her whole life, with Death walking alongside the whole way. It's horror, but it's really about grief, family, and the one relationship nobody escapes.

Slave is my duality novel — two women, two centuries, one diary. Wilhelmina is eighteen and enslaved in 1826; Sherelle is eighteen and free in 2026, and she finds Wilhelmina's diary. Their struggles rhyme across two hundred years. It's available for pre-order now and releases November 29. The tagline says it all: Two women. Two different centuries. One diary.

I'm writing the most personal book of my life — a novel called Imagine That. It's semi-autobiographical, and I won't lie: I think it's going to be my magnum opus. It has me on a tangent I've never been on.

That Newark, NJ is a real place full of real people, not a headline. That death isn't the enemy everybody treats it like. And that an indie author with no big machine behind him can still tell stories that matter. If a reader finishes one of my books and sees the world a little differently, I've done my job.

I'm visual-first — I can't write a single word without a picture in front of me. I design my covers first and use them as my compass while I draft. Then I put the music on, and I lose time until the chapter's done. It's invigorating. Honestly — the chapters write me as much as I write them.

Eric Jerome Dickey, James Patterson, and Stephen King. King's It is my all-time favorite book.

Everything runs through my links hub: https://links.fans/authorthecunninglinguist — my Amazon page, my socials, all of it. And if you read one of my books, leave a review. For an indie author, that's worth more than gold.