From poet
to librettist.
This is how it happened.
"I didn't set out to write an opera. I set out to tell the truth about what Black imagination looks like when it has no ceiling."
I am a Black Southern woman. I grew up in a tradition of storytelling — of poetry passed down through kitchens and churches, of language used as both shield and sword. When Cincinnati Opera offered me a part in the Black Opera Project, I said yes before I fully understood what yes meant.
What I understood was the call. There is a lineage of Black creative work that has always been ahead of its time — not because it reached for the future, but because it refused to be confined by the present. I wanted to write something in that tradition. Something that placed Black women at the center of an epic journey. Something that asked: What does love look like without limits?
And then I remembered Tut.
Tut is a language indigenous to Black Americans — passed down from ancestors who developed it as a mechanism for learning to read and write when it was illegal for them to do so. The word for love in Tut is lalovavi. The moment I heard it, I knew: that was the title. That was the spine of everything.
Writing this libretto meant sitting at the intersection of three things I care about most: the archive of Black language, the power of Afrofuturism to imagine liberation, and the journey of a woman who refuses to let other people determine her destiny. Persephone's story is epic. But it is also deeply personal.
lalovavi
Tut · /lah-low-VAH-vee/ · "love"
Tut is a language indigenous to Black Americans — created by enslaved ancestors who developed it as a way to learn to read and write when literacy was a criminal act. It was passed down in secret, generation to generation, through Black Southern communities.
LALOVAVI is the first media production in history to feature Tut. The opera is sung in both English and Tut, with projected translations, honoring the language as the living, breathing inheritance it is — not a relic, but a root.
For me, working with Tut was not a stylistic choice. It was a moral one. If we are making an opera about Black futurity, Black love, and Black self-determination, then we write it in the language our ancestors made so they could be free.
A language born in secret. Now sung on stage.
Origin
Developed by enslaved Black Americans as a secret literacy tool when reading was outlawed.
Legacy
Passed down orally through Black Southern families; now preserved and taught in communities across the U.S.
Set 400 years in the future. Rooted in now.
Atlas — the city formerly known as Atlanta — runs on Syndica: a gene that determines status, vitality, and longevity. Persephone, the youngest daughter of the city's ruler, discovers she carries a version of Syndica that confers immortality. Betrayed by her own family and forced to run for her life, she embarks on an epic journey that uncovers a hidden past and leads her to the true meaning of love and self-determination.
LALOVAVI is a story about what it means to possess something extraordinary in a world that will punish you for it.
It is about the people who learn to survive.
It is about love as the one force that outlasts power.
What is Afrofuturism?
Afrofuturism is a cultural and artistic movement that centers Black imagination in visions of the future. It is the process of reclaiming the right to dream forward after centuries of being excluded from narratives of progress, science, and possibility.
It asks: What does the future look like when Black people are not just surviving in it — but building it, leading it and loving freely within it?
Afrofuturism traces back to writers such as Octavia Butler, artists such as Sun Ra, and filmmakers such as John Sayles.
Black creators placed themselves in science fiction and speculative worlds long before it was recognized as a genre.
ROOTS
Atlas is Atlanta 400 years on, complex, and governed by its own rules. The future here is not a white-walled spaceship. It is a Black Southern city, remembered and reimagined, with its own language, its own hierarchies, and its own heartbreak.
IN LALOVAVI
When Black people imagine the future, we are doing something radical: insisting we will be in it. Afrofuturism is not escapism. It is a claim on tomorrow, and LALOVAVI makes that claim in the oldest language Black Americans ever made.
WHY IT MATTERS