Adrian Cato is a PhD student in the Department of African American Studies at Emory University. She intends to focus her dissertation on the Eastern oyster and its deeply held connections to African American coastal legacies in the southeastern United States. She is invested in complex narratives that present the duality of the ocean, as a site of historical trauma for the African diaspora and a place of Black liberation and multi-species kinship. Her work is informed by Black ecofeminist thought, Black ecologies, and critical geographies.