I was born in Lebanon and from 1989 to 2003 I had the privilege of living in Greater New Orleans (Kenner) where I was introduced to African American culture and language, and earned a BS in Computer Science at the University of New Orleans. While completing a computational-linguistic thesis for an MS in Computer Science from the American University of Beirut (AUB), I learned about linguistics as an academic field. A journey of personal study and research in linguistics was followed by an MA in English Language where I carried out corpus linguistic research in metaphor. Here at UBC I am embarking on corpus-linguistic research in African American literature through a cognitive linguistic lens that explores the role of metaphoric constructions in the evolution of the African American literary voice. My methodology naturally integrates the literacies and tendencies from my previous academic background, and explores aspects of my lived experience to bring to light what is lurking in textual data.