photo by Brittany Maxste

Grace is a writer, imaginary, and world-bender curating at the intersection of queerness, resource mobilization, climate & environmental justice, and Black dignity & imagination. She is grounded and guided by Walida Imarisha’s visionary fiction, Christina Sharpe’s wake work, bell hook’s revolutionary love, and tasha’s reminder to take care. She approaches her work with curiosity, limitlessness, and an unflinching orientation toward abundance and collective liberation. 

She created and stewards The Lupine Collaborative (TLC), an literary organization for Black women, transgender, and non-binary climate & environmental writers. The Lupine Collaborative’s mission is to advance environmental and climate justice by abundantly resourcing Black women, transgender, and non-binary people to dream, ideate, and write toward a liberatory future. TLC resources these communities through writing retreats, creative grants, and a partnership with the publisher Milkweed Editions.

Grace has consulted environmental philanthropies and organizations on their grantmaking approach, strategies, and practices. She advised the Doris Duke Foundation on their $1.2 million Building an Inclusive Conservation Movement Program and led a Diversifying the Conservation Field project that guided the foundation to determine its grantmaking focus. She advised the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The David and Lucile Packard Foundation on their $10 million investment in the development, empowerment, and growth of emerging and active environmental justice leaders from throughout California. Additionally, she led The National Wildlife Federation’s Women in Conservation program through a theory of change, advised on the strategy of The North Face’s Explorer Fund, and successfully led the search for Patagonia’s inaugural Environmental Justice Program Officer. 

She has been brought into numerous other environmental, conservation, and outdoor research organizations including the Network for Energy, Water and Health in Affordable Buildings, Next 100 Coalition, Earth Island Institute, and Meridian Institute to develop and implement programming for communities of color. 

Prior to consulting, Grace co-led People of the Global Majority in the Outdoors, Nature, and Environment, the largest gathering of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who worked in connection with the land. With a network of over 5,000, PGM ONE was created in response to that lack of spaces that celebrated, acknowledged, and uplifted the experience of those communities. In her position, Grace created operational and partnership practices from the ground up and moved PGM ONE from a volunteer organization to a fiscally sponsored non-profit that employed two co-directors and a leadership circle of 20.  She had the opportunity to build and also created multiple funds including designing and administering the Black Joy Fund, raising and rapidly distributing $30,000 in the summer of 2020, and the Queer and Trans People of Color Fund, designed to make PGM ONE more accessible to those communities.

In 2021, Grace was awarded an 18-month fellowship funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Pisces Foundation that allowed her the time, space, and capital necessary to design the framework for what is now The Lupine Collaborative. In 2024, Grace was awarded a 12-month fellowship as a thought partner, catalytic organizer, and writer with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors to further their Shifting Systems Initiatives and Climate Philanthropy.

Grace has served on the boards of GirlVentures, Cycles of Change, and The Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity at the University of California at Berkeley. She has been featured by The National Wildlife Federation, The Headlands Institute, Save The Redwoods League, and Bicycling Magazine, amongst others. 

She has been an alum of the Storyknife Writers Retreat, Philoxenia Black Writers Retreat, and Rockland Residency’s Inaugural Black Artist Cohort. 

In addition to world-bending, Grace is delighted by food, books, bicycles, and trying to travel everywhere with one bag.