 Hi, my name is De'Andre Miles Hercules. I'm a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I study the various ways that language organizes power, culture, and identity, with a particular focus on language, race, and gender, and the ways they intersect with a specific focus on black communities, on femme folks, on queer and trans folks. I came into anthropology as an undergraduate at Emory University, where after having read folks like Zordon or Hurston when I was in high school in Prince George's County, Maryland, and seeing the ways that culture been inscribed in text, the things that I had experienced growing up, when I found out that anthropology could be a way of studying from an intellectual perspective, these things that I had held so dear, you know, I thought the sky was the limit, and so being exposed to not just the ways that culture had been inscribed via text, but as well as large as the world was, you know, coming from Prince George's County, Maryland as a first-generation student and seeing how big the world was, anthropology gave me a lens through which to view and study and analyze all the things I was learning about via this thing that we wrestle with called culture, and it's continued to provide an instrumental lens through which I can continue to see the world in new and creative ways and push forward the work of studying black culture in particular in a way that highlights those nuances, that beauty, and that complexity, and so for the rest of my career, I will continue to be informed by the ways that anthropology gets us forward in that endeavor.