As the son of Jamaican immigrants growing up in Virginia, DeVonn Francis hated being the kid who showed up to his middle school cafeteria with oxtails in his lunchbox. “I just didn’t embrace it,” he says about the fragrant foods—loaded with ginger and allspice—that colored his childhood and alienated his classmates.
Today, the 28-year-old artist and chef has completed his about-face, throwing Caribbean-themed dinner parties through his New York City–based event production company, . Francis founded the company in 2017 as a way to interrogate his own Jamaican heritage, while encouraging others to seek joy in their identities. “I based it off a model that I grew up in,” he says. “We had block parties and christenings and weddings. We were just a household of Jamaicans who loved to entertain and to have people around.”Francis moved to Manhattan when he was 19, and spent much of his early adulthood poring over the books of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde.
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