Kaplan Villacorte Trudo (they/them) is a third-year graduate student in the Africana Studies Doctoral Program at Brown University.

Born and raised in Southern California, they earned their BA from Loyola Marymount University in Psychology and English Writing in 2014.

Kaplan moved from California to St. Louis, Missouri, in 2015 as an Americorps Volunteer and subsequently spent over six years in the specialty coffee industry at the illustrious Rise Coffee House, as barista, general manager, and roaster.

Their wellness is deeply dependent on living a creative life, especially as a writer. They find deep grounding in the practice of Yoga, and connections—to self, others, the universe—that influence their work.

When they’re not on their mat, teaching Yoga, or making coffee, they’re living out the Taurus and Enneagram 4 dream by eating a lot of good food, listening to the same playlists on repeat, writing in more notebooks than they can count, and periodically contemplating the vastness of the universe. Kaplan started a project called The River Daily, a personal practice for contemplation around race, identity, and history, and began sharing it publicly after experiencing its transformative potential in the summer of 2020.

Currently, Kaplan is in their third year of graduate school—specifically qualifying exams, which they’ve written about here and here. Their writing and study lives at the intersections of black and queer affects, black literature and aesthetics, slavery and race-making. They have a really difficult time paring down their ideas, and are currently trying to figure out what this whole dissertation thing is gonna be about. Standby.