Ashley J. May is an anthropologist, vintage book collector, and community archivist born and raised in the settler/enslaver landscape of Los Angeles, CA–the unceded territory of the Tongva people. Currently a PhD student in Anthropology at Brown University, Ashley draws upon ethnographic, archival, and archaeological methods to examine the folk beliefs, rituals, and values that nourish Black children’s worldmaking, how they encounter a place in relation to its many histories, human and more-than-human, and the quotidian practices Black children and their kin engage in to create sanctuary in the ongoing presence of subjection.
Ashley finds joy in curating collections of books authored by Black writers and illustrators she found in the stacks of her grandparents’ home libraries. And, gathering with Black children and their kin in the urban forests of South Los Angeles to heal, to tell stories, and to imagine new worlds together. Together with her collaborator, Jessica Lewis Stevens, she archives these experiments in community grounded, collaborative ethnography through a three-volume zine and oral history project titled Thirty Sunsets and a Moon.