Safiya Fredericks

In an alternate present-day version of Oakland, black telemarketer Cassius Green discovers a magical key to professional success – which propels him into a macabre universe.

Cass juggles jobs as a nanny, restaurant server, and party drug dealer in order to make ends meet and pay for their tiny San Francisco apartment. After a one night stand with Kalli, a co-worker they have a crush on, Cass agrees to watch her 11-year-old daughter, Ari, while she goes out of town. But as days pass without word from Kalli, Cass and Ari form a bond that spirals Cass back to their own difficult childhood and the pain they’ve been running from.

1971 post civil rights San Francisco seemed like the perfect place for a black Korean War veteran and his family to realize their dream of economic independence, and a chance for him to be his own boss. Charlie Walker would soon find out how naive he was. In a city full of impostors and naysayers, he refused to take "No" for an answer. That is, until a catastrophic disaster opened a door that had never been open to a Black man before. This is a story about what happened when he stepped through that door with both feet.

Four artists in the Bay Area find their lives unexpectedly intertwined — with each other’s and with the life of a black queer feminist writer from the 1960s — in this story that challenges our definitions of love, family and what it means to create.

Involuntarily displaced in Chicago two months post-Katrina, 13-year-old Davis wrestles with the cultural landscape of a new city and school community while secretly coping with the PTSD of an assault at the Superdome. With her mother still in New Orleans committed to the fight for Black land ownership and her father committed to starting a new life in the Midwest, divorce threatens to further separate a family already torn apart. Will Davis be left hanging in the balance? [hieroglyph] traverses the intersection of environmental racism, sexual violence, and displacement, examining the psychological effects of a state-sanctioned man-made disaster on the most vulnerable members of the Katrina diaspora.

When a Filipino-American family reunites for a Christmas party, the holiday takes a dark turn when they conspire to murder the abusive bully of the family.