Tulips in the Garden:
A Black Queer Supper Club
Tulips in the Garden is a soft landing space for Black Queer women, femmes, and gender non-conforming millennials in Durham, North Carolina. We queer Sunday dinner, celebrate Black Queer joy, and foster place-based solidarity.
tulips in the garden
gatherings
We queer Sunday dinner by hosting gatherings that center Black Queer joy, nourishment, and community building. With staple gatherings, we partner with local non-profits or community initiatives to give back, ensuring that the love we cultivate around the table extends back into the wider Durham community.
<<photos by marwa ali
Founder & Host
Maurisa li-a-ping
Maurisa is a Writer & Cultural Strategist. She built Tulips in the Garden to prioritize and nurture Black Queer millennials' interiority. She sought to create a safe space that reclaims and celebrates our softness, resilience, and collective joy. When she isn't stewarding tulips in the garden, you can find Maurisa practing yoga and partnering with mission-driven organizations to build people-centered cultures.
Partner With Us
Tulips in the Garden grows from community care, collaboration, and love. Whether you’re an individual, organization, or local business, there are many ways to help us thrive.[email protected]
Ordinary Intimacies
Ordinary Intimacies is a living archive that explores the sweet play, nuanced conflict, aging wisdom, and daily routines that shape Black Queer life. Over food, drinks, and soulful conversation, we sit down with Black Queer women, femmes, and gender non-conforming folks (ages 25+) to reflect on the stories that live in the group chat, voice notes, and journals. Each conversation and guest is honored with an online feature contributing to our living archive.
meet the team
Maurisa Li-A-Ping
Dasia Moore
Danielle Davis
Olivia McNeill
get involved
We invite you to take part by nominating yourself or helping sustain our archive. Each path supports an space where current and future generations can recognize themselves through our shared ways of loving, gathering, caring, laughing, and making meaning.
meet the team
Maurisa Li-A-Ping (Msed, mfa)is a Writer & Cultural Strategist based in Durham, honoring the interiority of Black queer women. When she's not stewarding community or partnering with organizations on culture building, you’ll find her on a trail walk, painting her nails pink, writing, or practicing yoga.
Olivia is a community-based teacher-learner and researcher with over a decade of teaching and research experience. They are a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Social Justice Education, a Research Enhancement and Leadership (REAL) Fellow, and the 2025 Dr. Maurianne Adams Endowed Social Justice Scholarship Recipient at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Olivia lives in Durham, North Carolina, where she collaborates with multigenerational groups to archive Black Aliveness in the South.
Dasia Moore is a poet, journalist, and queer child of the Black South. Her work has appeared in publications including The Offing, Fence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Boston Globe, where she was a magazine staff writer. Committed to preserving Black histories, Dasia works with community-based nonprofits to create archival and commemorative publications. She teaches at Redbud Writing Project and elsewhere and has received fellowships from Charleston Literary Festival, North Carolina Arts Council, and New York University, where she completed her MFA in poetry. Raised in both Carolinas, Dasia calls Durham, NC home.
Danielle Davis is a multidisciplined researcher and project coordinator from the Bull City. As a local, she is fiercely committed to supporting Black Queer millennials through outreach and community based organizing. Increasing accessibility to resources and education are the core tenets of her work. Outside of organizing, Danielle is a lover of all things vintage. Catch her at your local consignment shop looking for the best finds.