Derrick Carr has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since he was old enough to read. He graduated from Yale in 2011 with a degree in Black people. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Muzzle Magazine, Adroit, and Oakland Review. He’s co-edited Tandem, an annual anthology published through The Lit Slam, a nonprofit working to broaden the conversation around literature. He’s participated in KSW/CIIS’s Interdisciplinary Writer’s Lab and is a founding fellow in OCTO, an interdisciplinary collective of black artists in the Bay Area. Like his mother and grandmothers, all he knows is survival. You can keep up with him at tinyletter.com/whyderrick