Hess Love
Cultural Strategist, Environmental Ethnographer, Writer.
What I do:
I build bridges between communities and institutions, turning research, data, and cultural memory into stories that move, inform, and heal.
What I study :
how people, especially in the Chesapeake region, have long used spiritual practices, land traditions, and stories to care for the environment, heal from harm, reimagine governance, and pass down knowledge. I bring these valuable methods to the surface so communities can remember, restore, and care for both people and places.
My center/crossroads :
Belonging + Magic in the Mundane
Why it’s important:
Research is only as powerful as its ability to resonate with the people and places it serves. We’ve worked hard to know what we know and I help ensure that knowledge doesn’t get lost. The lives of our ancestors show us that history is alive and seeded with experiments, failures, and innovation.
Who I work with:
I partner with communities, institutions, individuals, & the more-than-human world.
Who I do this for:
everyone (and everything) I’ve ever loved
Hi, I’m Hess.
It’s a family name. Before me, there were and are others. Before us all there was Hester: the last woman in our family to be enslaved via chattel slavery in the U.S.
Hester (sometimes called Hess) was born, loved, enslaved, freed, married, mothering, grieving, living, and buried in the same city that most of her descendants were born and raised in -including myself. Hester’s story and the space it took place in has been sacred to my family for generations, and I bare a fragment of her name.
In a sense, I was predestined to find purpose in the preservation of place, plants, and people.
I am a hoodoo-mother-poet, playwright, ethnographer, Master Naturalist, Watershed Steward, Woodlands Steward, and apprentice hunter who carries Afro-Chesapeake tradition at the heart of my work.
The expanse of my work rekindles a deep sense of being and creativity. It allows my rootedness -as a keeper of the AfroChesapeake experience- to serve as a model. I use the medicine of wonder and tenderness toward the suppressed, the fragmented, and the unknown. I encourage others to reclaim their stories, commit to wisdom, reintegrate themselves into the wild, and learn how to become a symbiont with their ancestors, adored ones, and the more-than-human world. My work moves between whimsy and solemnity, contemplating the present world alongside the layered realities of the past, future, and now.
In community and creative ventures, I move as the founder of the Chesapeake Conjure Society (the first Hoodoo Society). I hold a Master of Arts in Playwriting, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. I’m also a Black burial ground advocate, ritualist, writer, an independent scholar, folklorist with a concentration on Hoodoo and Black Atlantic Religion in the Chesapeake Bay region, and Curator of Black Americana Religion and Spirituality (Folk Belief) for African American Folklorists magazine.
In my career, I currently serve as a Maryland Governor appointed/Senate confirmed Commissioner for a historical city (with a focus on archaeology, K-12 education, adult education, museum interpretation, and community engagement), a citizen scientist appointee (with a focus on environmental legacy through archaeology on sites of enslavement, non-native & invasive plant species, and culturally responsive climate education) with an Environmental Research Center, a heritage preservationist, and a Communications Strategist for an AfroFuturist research and evaluation firm. Previously I was the Descendant Communicator for a historic, Up-South Appalachian archeological site, burial ground, and furnace..