CELESTE RITA BAKER -- 6PM, THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2016

Calabar Imports Harlem

2504 Frederick Douglass Blvd. (at 134^th Street).

Harlem, New York 10030

CELESTE RITA BAKER, now happily ensconced in Harlem, is a Virgin Islander through the Head of Main Street Bryans and the St. Johnian McKetneys.  Baker’s  genres include speculative fiction, magical realism and reality-based fiction.  She   has been published in The Caribbean Writer, Calabash, Margin’s Magical Realism, Scarab, Moko Magazine, and Abyss & Apex Magazine.  Her collection of short stories, Back, Belly & Side: True Lies and False Tales (Aqueduct Press), is written in Caribbean dialect and Standard English.  Baker is presently working on a speculative fiction novel about a saint who reluctantly finds herself in the body of a Black woman in New York City about 50 years from now.   

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA is a reading/discussion series created and moderated by Dr. Celesti Colds Fechter, Exec. Director of Education Success Services and Prof., Org. Behavior, King Graduate School, New Rochelle.  The series features poetry, prose, memoir, essay, reportage, urban writing by African and African diasporan women. Past readers include Opal Palmer Adisa, Amber Atiya, Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, Pamela Booker, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Merle Collins, Lorraine Currelley, Carole Boyce Davies, Bridget Davis, LaTasha Diggs, Kim Coleman Foote, Ifeona Fulani, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hand, Eartha Watts Hicks, J.P. Howard, Linda Susan Jackson,  Pamela Jackson, Jacqueline Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Tayari Jones, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Nigeria Lockley, Yvette Louis, Cynthia Manick, Diana McCaulay, Rosalind McLymont, Pam Mordecai, Elizabeth Nunez, Ebele Oseye, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Cecily Rodway, Gammy Singer, Danyel Smith, Patricia Smith, Martha Southgate, Eisa Ulen, and Tiphanie Yanique.  

The venue, Calabar Imports Harlem, is provided by Atim Anette Otun.  The series is co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine.

Questions, comments, suggestions:  womenwritersofdiaspora@gmail.com.

COMING NEXT MONTH -- STEPHANIE RENÉE PAYNE & MECCA JAMILAH SULLIVAN

Next month is looking great for WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA.  Join us at Calabar Imports Harlem (13^4th St. & Frederick Douglass Blvd.) at 6pm on the first and third Thursdays of May 2016..  Clear your calendars!

May 5, 2016 - Stephanie Renée Payne earned her BA in liberal arts at The New School and her MFA in creative writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts.  She has studied world religions and spiritual practices, and is the founder and CEO of the online social network, One Woman One Voice. Payne is a certified life coach and author of ESP: Extreme Self Pampering for the Soul.  Her writing has appeared in Knowing Our Names, For Harriet, Shadowbox Literary Magazine, Hunger Mountain: the VCFA Journal of the Arts, and One Voice Literary Magazine.  Her latest project, "Unbroken: One Daughter's Journey," is a story of self-reflection and childhood memories that is layered with the little-known history of Black Angelenos.  In addition to being an author and CEO, Payne is adjunct English faculty at Temple University and Bucks County Community College.  She has also taught in the Writing Department at The New School.

May 19, 2016 - Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is a Harlem native who uses her fiction to explore the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young black women, through voice, music, and hip-hop inflected magical realist techniques. She is the author of the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015). Her work has appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Writing, American Fiction: Best New Stories by Emerging Writers, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, BLOOM: Queer Fiction, Art, Poetry and More, TriQuarterly, Feminist Studies All About Skin: Short Stories by Award-Winning Women Writers of Color, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing and many others. She is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, and fellowships, scholarships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she received a 2011 Emerging Writers Fellowship.

Sullivan is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University, and a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College.  Her critical and scholarly work on sexuality, identity, and poetics in contemporary African Diaspora culture has appeared in publications including Palimpsest: Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, Jacket2, Public Books, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help: Critical Perspectives on White-Authored Narratives of Black Life, Ebony.com, Zora Magazine, TheRoot.com, Ms. Magazine online, and The Feminist Wire, where she serves as Associate Editor for Arts & Culture. Her research and scholarship have earned support from the Mellon-Mays Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, Williams College, where she received the Gaius Charles Bolin dissertation fellowship, and Rutgers University, where she was awarded the Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American and African Diaspora Literature. She is currently working on a book exploring the relationships among sexuality, identity, and genre in contemporary women’s literature of the African Diaspora..

The Women Writers of the Diaspora series was created by the series moderator, Dr. Celesti Colds Fechter.  The series is  co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine, and the venue, Calabar Imports is provided by Atim Oton. 

Follow our blog at http://womenwritersofdiaspora.blogspot.com/
Contact us  at womenwritersofdiaspora@gmail.com

FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN

Don't miss this Thursday's Women Writers of the Diaspora reading/discussion with FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN, William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia University. One of Dr. Griffin's areas of expertise is politics, so a discussion two days after the New York primary promises to be especially lively!

When: 6:00pm, Thursday, April 21, 2016
Where: Calabar Imports Harlem (corner 134th St. & Frederick Douglass Blvd.)

FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN (B.A., Harvard, Ph.D., Yale) is q true renaissance woman whose expertise spans the areas of American and African American literature, music, history and politics. Dr. Griffin, who received a 2006-2007 Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers fellowship at the New York Public Library, is the author of Who Set You Flowin’: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001) and Clawing At the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (Thomas Dunne, 2008). She is the editor of Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus (Knopf, 1999), co-editor with Cheryl Fish, of Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing (Beacon, 1998) and co-editor with Brent Edwards and Robert O'Meally of Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004).

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA is a reading/discussion series created and moderated by Dr. Celesti Colds Fechter,  Exec. Director of Education Success Services and Prof., Org. Behavior, King Graduate School, New Rochelle.  The series features poetry, prose, memoir, essay, reportage, urban writing by African and African diasporan women. Past readers include Opal Palmer Adisa, Amber Atiya, Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, Pamela Booker, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Merle Collins, Lorraine Currelley, Carole Boyce Davies, Bridget Davis, LaTasha Diggs, Kim Coleman Foote, Ifeona Fulani, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Monica Hand, Eartha Watts Hicks, J.P. Howard, Linda Susan Jackson,  Pamela Jackson, Jacqueline Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Tayari Jones, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Nigeria Lockley, Yvette Louis, Diana McCaulay, Rosalind McLymont, Pam Mordecai, Elizabeth Nunez, Ebele Oseye, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Cecily Rodway, Gammy Singer, Danyel Smith, Patricia Smith, Martha Southgate, Eisa Ulen, and Tiphanie Yanique. 

Be sure to mark your calendar for future readings/discussions: Stephanie Renee Payne, May 5; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, May 19;  Cynthia Mannick, Jun 9. Stay updated by following the WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA blog at http://womenwritersofdiaspora.blogspot.com/.

The venue, Calabar Imports Harlem, is provided by Atim Anette Otun.  The series is co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine.

Questions, comments, suggestions:  womenwritersofdiaspora@gmail.com

YVETTE LOUIS

Thursday, March 17, 2016m 6:00-7:15 pm

Calabar Imports Harlem

2504 Frederick Douglass Blvd. (at 134^th St.)

Harlem, NY 10030

YVETTE LOUIS is a Cuban-born independent scholar.  She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Literature/Writing from Columbia University, with a specialization in African diaspora literature.  She has taught at NYU, Vassar, Princeton, Hunter, New Jersey City University, and Sarah Lawrence College.  Her first work of fiction, La Revolución: A Novel, is a coming-of-age story about a five-year-old refugee girl who makes the trip from the warmth of her Afro-Cuban home in La Habana to a bitter cold New York City with the beloved grandmother she calls Mamá.  There, she is reunited with the mother who abandoned her at birth.  She grows up lost within a family she barely knows, fragmented by the Cuban revolution, the Civil Rights Movement, and the rebellions of the 1960s.  At the death of her grandmother, she must learn to mother herself alone in exile or perish.

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA is a reading/discussion series created and moderated by Dr. Celesti Colds Fechter, Exec. Director of Education Success Services and Prof., Org. Behavior, King Graduate School, New Rochelle.  The series features poetry, prose, memoir, essay, reportage, urban writing by African and African diasporan women. Past readers include Opal Palmer Adisa, Amber Atiya, Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, Pamela Booker, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Merle Collins, Lorraine Currelley, Carole Boyce Davies, Bridget Davis, LaTasha Diggs, Kim Coleman Foote, Ifeona Fulani, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Monica Hand, Eartha Watts Hicks, J.P. Howard, Linda Susan Jackson,  Pamela Jackson, Jacqueline Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Tayari Jones, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Nigeria Lockley, Diana McCaulay, Rosalind McLymont, Pam Mordecai, Elizabeth Nunez, Ebele Oseye, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Cecily Rodway, Gammy Singer, Danyel Smith, Patricia Smith, Martha Southgate, Eisa Ulen, and Tiphanie Yanique. 

Be sure to mark your calendar for future readings/discussions: Farah Jasmine Griffin, Apr 21; Stephanie Renee Payne, May 5; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, May 19;  Cynthia Manick, Jun 9; Celeste Rita Baker, June 23.  

Stay updated by following the WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA blog at http://womenwritersofdiaspora.blogspot.com/.

The venue, Calabar Imports Harlem, is provided by Atim Anette Otun.  The series is co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine.

Questions, comments, suggestions (including up-and-coming writers):  womenwritersofdiaspora@gmail.com

MAY 2016 WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA

Next month is looking great for WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA.  Join us at Calabar Imports Harlem (13^4th St. & Frederick Douglass Blvd.) at 6pm on the first and third Thursdays of May 2016..  Clear your calendars!

May 5, 2016 - Stephanie Renée Payne earned her BA in liberal arts at The New School and her MFA in creative writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts.  She has studied world religions and spiritual practices, and is the founder and CEO of the online social network, One Woman One Voice. Payne is a certified life coach and author of ESP: Extreme Self Pampering for the Soul.  Her writing has appeared in Knowing Our Names, For Harriet, Shadowbox Literary Magazine, Hunger Mountain: the VCFA Journal of the Arts, and One Voice Literary Magazine.  Her latest project, "Unbroken: One Daughter's Journey," is a story of self-reflection and childhood memories that is layered with the little-known history of Black Angelenos.  In addition to being an author and CEO, Payne is adjunct English faculty at Temple University and Bucks County Community College.  She has also taught in the Writing Department at The New School.

May 19, 2016 - Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is a Harlem native who uses her fiction to explore the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young black women, through voice, music, and hip-hop inflected magical realist techniques. She is the author of the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015). Her work has appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Writing, American Fiction: Best New Stories by Emerging Writers, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, BLOOM: Queer Fiction, Art, Poetry and More, TriQuarterly, Feminist Studies All About Skin: Short Stories by Award-Winning Women Writers of Color, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing and many others. She is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, and fellowships, scholarships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she received a 2011 Emerging Writers Fellowship.

Sullivan is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University, and a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College.  Her critical and scholarly work on sexuality, identity, and poetics in contemporary African Diaspora culture has appeared in publications including Palimpsest: Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, Jacket2, Public Books, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help: Critical Perspectives on White-Authored Narratives of Black Life, Ebony.com, Zora Magazine, TheRoot.com, Ms. Magazine online, and The Feminist Wire, where she serves as Associate Editor for Arts & Culture. Her research and scholarship have earned support from the Mellon-Mays Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, Williams College, where she received the Gaius Charles Bolin dissertation fellowship, and Rutgers University, where she was awarded the Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American and African Diaspora Literature. She is currently working on a book exploring the relationships among sexuality, identity, and genre in contemporary women’s literature of the African Diaspora..

The Women Writers of the Diaspora series was created by the series moderator, Dr. Celesti Colds Fechter.  The series is  co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine, and the venue, Calabar Imports is provided by Atim Oton. 

Follow our blog at http://womenwritersofdiaspora.blogspot.com/
Contact us  at womenwritersofdiaspora@gmail.com

JACQUELINE BISHOP - Thursday, February 18, 2016

I hope you have your calendars marked for Thursday, February 18 when multi-talented photographer-painter-writer JACQUELINE BISHOP will be the featured author in the next reading/discussion in the WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA series. 

When:  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2016, 6:00pm

Where: CALABAR IMPORTS HARLEM (corner of 134th St. & Frederick Douglass Blvd.)

JACQUELINE BISHOP, a New York University master teacher, is the author of The River's Song, Snapshots from Istanbul, Fauna, My Mother Who is Me: Life Stories of Jamaican Women in New York, and Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write.  

Bishop's latest book, The Gymnast and Other Positions was released in January 2016.  Her work in the visual arts has been exhibited in North America, North Africa, and Europe, and she is the creator of the Female Sexual Desire Project, which includes textile, video, and audio art. 

This promises to be a great reading and wide-ranging discussion, so be sure to come out and meet JACQUELINE BISHOP!

The WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA series, created and hosted by CELESTI COLDS FECHTER, PH.D., features poetry, prose, memoir, essay, reportage, urban writing by African and African diasporan women. Past readers include Opal Palmer Adisa, Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, Pamela Booker, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Merle Collins, Lorraine Currelley, Carole Boyce Davies, Bridget Davis, LaTasha Diggs, Kim Coleman Foote, Ifeona Fulani, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Monica Hand, Eartha Watts Hicks, J.P. Howard, Linda Susan Jackson,  Pamela Jackson, Jacqueline Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Tayari Jones, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Nigeria Lockley, Diana McCaulay, Rosalind McLymont, Pam Mordecai, Elizabeth Nunez, Ebele Oseye, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Cecily Rodway, Gammy Singer, Danyel Smith, Patricia Smith, Martha Southgate, Eisa Ulen, and Tiphanie Yanique.

Be sure to mark your calendar for Yvette Louis, Mar 17; Farah Jasmine Griffin, Apr 21; Stephanie Renee Payne, May 5; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, May 19; Cynthia Manick, June 9; and Celeste Rita Baker, June 23.

The venue, Calabar Imports Harlem, is generously provided by Atim Annette Otun, and the series is co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine.

Follow our blog at http://womenwritersofdiaspora.blogspot.com/.

Contact us at womenwritersofdiaspora@gmail.com.

CELESTE RITA BAKER

Thursday, June 23, 2016 6:00-7:15 pm

Calabar Imports Harlem

2504 Frederick Douglass Blvd. (at 134^th St.)

Harlem, NY 10030

CELESTE RITA BAKER, now happily ensconced in Harlem, is a Virgin Islander through the Head of Main Street Bryans and the St. Johnian McKetneys.  Baker’s  genres include speculative fiction, magical realism and reality-based fiction.  She   has been published in The Caribbean Writer, Calabash, Margin’s Magical Realism, Scarab, Moko Magazine, and Abyss & Apex Magazine.  Her collection of short stories, Back, Belly & Side: True Lies and False Tales (Aqueduct Press), is written in Caribbean dialect and Standard English.  Baker is presently working on a speculative fiction novel about a saint who reluctantly finds herself in the body of a Black woman in New York City about 50 years from now.   

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA is a reading/discussion series created and moderated by Celesti Colds Fechter, Ph.D.,  Exec. Director of Education Success Services and Prof., Org. Behavior, King Graduate School, New Rochelle.  The series features poetry, prose, memoir, essay, reportage, urban writing by African and African diasporan women. Past readers include Opal Palmer Adisa, Amber Atiya, Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, Pamela Booker, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Merle Collins, Lorraine Currelley, Carole Boyce Davies, Bridget Davis, LaTasha Diggs, Kim Coleman Foote, Ifeona Fulani, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hand, Eartha Watts Hicks, J.P. Howard, Linda Susan Jackson,  Pamela Jackson, Jacqueline Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Tayari Jones, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Nigeria Lockley, Yvette Louis, Cynthia Manick, Diana McCaulay, Rosalind McLymont, Pam Mordecai, Elizabeth Nunez, Ebele Oseye, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Cecily Rodway, Gammy Singer, Danyel Smith, Patricia Smith, Martha Southgate, Eisa Ulen, and Tiphanie Yanique. 

Be sure to stay updated by following the WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA blog at http://womenwritersofdiaspora.blogspot.com/.

The venue, Calabar Imports Harlem, is provided by Atim Anette Otun.  The series is co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine.

Questions, comments, suggestions:  womenwritersofdiaspora@gmail.com

CYNTHIA MANICK

Thursday, June 9, 2016 6:00-7:15 pm

Calabar Imports Harlem

2504 Frederick Douglass Blvd. (at 134^th St.)

Harlem, NY 10030

CYNTHIA MANICK is the author of Blue Hallelujahs  recently released by Black Lawrence Press. A Pushcart Prize nominated poet with a MFA in Creative Writing from The New School; she has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Fine Arts Work Center, the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences, Hedgebrook, and the Vermont Studio Center. She serves as East Coast Editor of the independent press Jamii Publishing and Founder and Curator of the reading series Soul Sister Revue. Manick’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in African American Review, BLACKBERRY: a magazine, Bone Bouquet, Box of Jars, Callaloo, Clockhouse, DMQ Review, Gemini Magazine, Human Equity Through Art (HEArt), Fjords Review, Kinfolks Quarterly, Kweli Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Passages North, Pedestal Magazine, PLUCK! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture, St. Ann’s Review, Sou’wester, Spillway Magazine, The Cossack Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Weary Blues, The Wide Shore: A Journal of Global Women’s Poetry, Tidal Basin Review, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA is a reading/discussion series created and moderated by Celesti Colds Fechter, Ph.D.,  Exec. Director of Education Success Services and Prof., Org. Behavior, King Graduate School, New Rochelle.  The series features poetry, prose, memoir, essay, reportage, urban writing by African and African diasporan women. Past readers include Opal Palmer Adisa, Amber Atiya, Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, Pamela Booker, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Merle Collins, Lorraine Currelley, Carole Boyce Davies, Bridget Davis, LaTasha Diggs, Kim Coleman Foote, Ifeona Fulani, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hand, Eartha Watts Hicks, J.P. Howard, Linda Susan Jackson,  Pamela Jackson, Jacqueline Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Tayari Jones, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Nigeria Lockley, Yvette Louis, Diana McCaulay, Rosalind McLymont, Pam Mordecai, Elizabeth Nunez, Ebele Oseye, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Cecily Rodway, Gammy Singer, Danyel Smith, Patricia Smith, Martha Southgate, Eisa Ulen, and Tiphanie Yanique. 

Be sure to mark your calendar for future readings/discussions: Celeste Rita Baker, June 23.

Stay updated by following the WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA blog at http://womenwritersofdiaspora.blogspot.com/.

The venue, Calabar Imports Harlem, is provided by Atim Anette Otun.  The series is co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine.

Questions, comments, suggestions:  womenwritersofdiaspora@gmail.com

MECCA JAMILAH SULLIVAN

Thursday, May 19, 2016, 6:00pm - 7:30pm

Calabar Imports Harlem (134th & Frederick Douglass Blvd.)

Harlem, New York 10030

 MECCA JAMILAH SULLIVAN is a Harlem native who uses her fiction to explore the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young black women, through voice, music, and hip-hop inflected magical realist techniques. She is the author of the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015). Her work has appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Writing, American Fiction: Best New Stories by Emerging Writers, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, BLOOM: Queer Fiction, Art, Poetry and More, TriQuarterly, Feminist Studies All About Skin: Short Stories by Award-Winning Women Writers of Color, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing and many others. She is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, and fellowships, scholarships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she received a 2011 Emerging Writers Fellowship.

Sullivan is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University, and a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College.  Her critical and scholarly work on sexuality, identity, and poetics in contemporary African Diaspora culture has appeared in publications including Palimpsest: Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, Jacket2, Public Books, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help: Critical Perspectives on White-Authored Narratives of Black Life, Ebony.com, Zora Magazine, TheRoot.com, Ms. Magazine online, and The Feminist Wire, where she serves as Associate Editor for Arts & Culture. Her research and scholarship have earned support from the Mellon-Mays Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, Williams College, where she received the Gaius Charles Bolin dissertation fellowship, and Rutgers University, where she was awarded the Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American and African Diaspora Literature. She is currently working on a book exploring the relationships among sexuality, identity, and genre in contemporary women’s literature of the African Diaspora..

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA is a reading/discussion series created and moderated by Celesti Colds Fechter, Ph.D.,  Exec. Director of Education Success Services and Prof., Org. Behavior, King Graduate School, New Rochelle.  The series features poetry, prose, memoir, essay, reportage, urban writing by African and African diasporan women. Past readers include Opal Palmer Adisa, Amber Atiya, Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, Pamela Booker, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Merle Collins, Lorraine Currelley, Carole Boyce Davies, Bridget Davis, LaTasha Diggs, Kim Coleman Foote, Ifeona Fulani, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hand, Eartha Watts Hicks, J.P. Howard, Linda Susan Jackson,  Pamela Jackson, Jacqueline Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Tayari Jones, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Nigeria Lockley, Yvette Louis, Diana McCaulay, Rosalind McLymont, Pam Mordecai, Elizabeth Nunez, Ebele Oseye, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Cecily Rodway, Gammy Singer, Danyel Smith, Patricia Smith, Martha Southgate, Eisa Ulen, and Tiphanie Yanique. 

Be sure to mark your calendar for future readings/discussions: Cynthia Manick, Jun 9, and Celeste Rita Baker, June 23. Stay updated by following the WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA blog at http://womenwritersofdiaspora.blogspot.com/.

The venue, Calabar Imports Harlem, is provided by Atim Anette Otun.  The series is co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine.

Questions, comments, suggestions:  womenwritersofdiaspora@gmail.com

STEPHANIE RENÉE PAYNE

Thursday, May 5, 2016 6:00-7:15 pm

Calabar Imports Harlem

2504 Frederick Douglass Blvd. (at 134^th St.)

Harlem, NY 10030

STEPHANIE RENÉE PAYNE is founder and CEO of One Woman One Voice Project, a certified life coach, and author of ESP: Extreme Self Pampering for the Soul.  She has written numerous essays and short fiction, which are featured in Hunger Mountain, Shadowbox, and For Harriet, and others.

Stephanie was invited to give a TEDx Talk, where she discussed limiting cultural constructs. She has taught creative writing at The New School, and is currently completing a memoir, Unbroken: One Daughter's Journey. She holds a MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. 

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA is a reading/discussion series created and moderated by Dr. Celesti Colds Fechter,  Exec. Director of Education Success Services and Prof., Org. Behavior, King Graduate School, New Rochelle.  The series features poetry, prose, memoir, essay, reportage, urban writing by African and African diasporan women. Past readers include Opal Palmer Adisa, Amber Atiya, Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, Pamela Booker, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Merle Collins, Lorraine Currelley, Carole Boyce Davies, Bridget Davis, LaTasha Diggs, Kim Coleman Foote, Ifeona Fulani, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Monica Hand, Eartha Watts Hicks, J.P. Howard, Linda Susan Jackson,  Pamela Jackson, Jacqueline Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Tayari Jones, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Nigeria Lockley, Yvette Louis, Diana McCaulay, Rosalind McLymont, Pam Mordecai, Elizabeth Nunez, Ebele Oseye, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Cecily Rodway, Gammy Singer, Danyel Smith, Patricia Smith, Martha Southgate, Eisa Ulen, and Tiphanie Yanique. 

Be sure to mark your calendar for future readings/discussions: Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, May 19;  Cynthia Manick, Jun 9; and Celeste Rita Baker, Jun 23.

Stay updated by following the WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA blog at http://womenwritersofdiaspora.blogspot.com/.

The venue, Calabar Imports Harlem, is provided by Atim Anette Otun.  The series is co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine.

Questions, comments, suggestions:  womenwritersofdiaspora@gmail.com

FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN

Thursday, April 21, 2016 6:00-7:15 pm

Calabar Imports Harlem

2504 Frederick Douglass Blvd. (at 134^th St.)

Harlem, NY 10030

FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN (B.A., Harvard, Ph.D., Yale) is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia University.  Her major areas of expertise are American and African American literature, music, history and politics. She has received numerous honors and awards for her teaching and scholarship, including a 2006-2007 Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers fellowship at the New York Public Library.  Griffin is the author of Who Set You Flowin’: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001) and Clawing At the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (Thomas Dunne, 2008). She is the editor of Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus (Knopf, 1999), co-editor with Cheryl Fish, of Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing (Beacon, 1998) and co-editor with Brent Edwards and Robert O'Meally of Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004).

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA is a reading/discussion series created and moderated by Dr. Celesti Colds Fechter,  Exec. Director of Education Success Services and Prof., Org. Behavior, King Graduate School, New Rochelle.  The series features poetry, prose, memoir, essay, reportage, urban writing by African and African diasporan women. Past readers include Opal Palmer Adisa, Amber Atiya, Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, Pamela Booker, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Merle Collins, Lorraine Currelley, Carole Boyce Davies, Bridget Davis, LaTasha Diggs, Kim Coleman Foote, Ifeona Fulani, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Monica Hand, Eartha Watts Hicks, J.P. Howard, Linda Susan Jackson,  Pamela Jackson, Jacqueline Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Tayari Jones, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Nigeria Lockley, Yvette Louis, Diana McCaulay, Rosalind McLymont, Pam Mordecai, Elizabeth Nunez, Ebele Oseye, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Cecily Rodway, Gammy Singer, Danyel Smith, Patricia Smith, Martha Southgate, Eisa Ulen, and Tiphanie Yanique. 

Be sure to mark your calendar for future readings/discussions: Stephanie Renee Payne, May 5; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, May 19;  Cynthia Manick, Jun 9; and Celeste Rita Baker, Jun 23.

Stay updated by following the WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA blog at http://womenwritersofdiaspora.blogspot.com/.

The venue, Calabar Imports Harlem, is provided by Atim Anette Otun.  The series is co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine.

Questions, comments, suggestions:  womenwritersofdiaspora@gmail.com

YVETTE LOUIS

Thursday, March 17, 2016m 6:00-7:15 pm

Calabar Imports Harlem

2504 Frederick Douglass Blvd. (at 134^th St.)

Harlem, NY 10030

YVETTE LOUIS is a Cuban-born independent scholar.  She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Literature/Writing from Columbia University, with a specialization in African diaspora literature.  She has taught at NYU, Vassar, Princeton, Hunter, New Jersey City University, and Sarah Lawrence College.  Her first work of fiction, La Revolución: A Novel, is a coming-of-age story about a five-year-old refugee girl who makes the trip from the warmth of her Afro-Cuban home in La Habana to a bitter cold New York City with the beloved grandmother she calls Mamá.  There, she is reunited with the mother who abandoned her at birth.  She grows up lost within a family she barely knows, fragmented by the Cuban revolution, the Civil Rights Movement, and the rebellions of the 1960s.  At the death of her grandmother, she must learn to mother herself alone in exile or perish.

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA is a reading/discussion series created and moderated by Dr. Celesti Colds Fechter, Exec. Director of Education Success Services and Prof., Org. Behavior, King Graduate School, New Rochelle.  The series features poetry, prose, memoir, essay, reportage, urban writing by African and African diasporan women. Past readers include Opal Palmer Adisa, Amber Atiya, Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, Pamela Booker, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Merle Collins, Lorraine Currelley, Carole Boyce Davies, Bridget Davis, LaTasha Diggs, Kim Coleman Foote, Ifeona Fulani, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Monica Hand, Eartha Watts Hicks, J.P. Howard, Linda Susan Jackson,  Pamela Jackson, Jacqueline Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Tayari Jones, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Nigeria Lockley, Diana McCaulay, Rosalind McLymont, Pam Mordecai, Elizabeth Nunez, Ebele Oseye, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Cecily Rodway, Gammy Singer, Danyel Smith, Patricia Smith, Martha Southgate, Eisa Ulen, and Tiphanie Yanique. 

Be sure to mark your calendar for future readings/discussions: Farah Jasmine Griffin, Apr 21; Stephanie Renee Payne, May 5; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, May 19;  Cynthia Manick, Jun 9; Celeste Rita Baker, June 23.  

Stay updated by following the WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA blog at http://womenwritersofdiaspora.blogspot.com/.

The venue, Calabar Imports Harlem, is provided by Atim Anette Otun.  The series is co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine.

Questions, comments, suggestions (including up-and-coming writers):  womenwritersofdiaspora@gmail.com

AMBER ATIYA

Thursday, March 3, 2016, 6:30pm - 7:30pm

Calabar Imports Harlem

2504 Frederick Douglass Blvd. (corner of 134^th St.)

Harlem, New York 10030

AMBER ATIYA is the Brooklyn-born author of the chapbook the fierce bums of doo-wop (Argos Books, 2014).  Her work has appeared in Black Renaissance Noire, Bone Bouquet, Boston Review, Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, and elsewhere.  She was a 2012 Poets House Fellow; her poems were selected for Best of the Net 2014 and she was a 2015 Best New Poets nominee.  Amber’s  work has also been featured on the Poetry Foundation’s radio and podcast series PoetryNow.

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA is a reading/discussion series created and moderated by Dr. Celesti Colds Fechter, Exec. Director of Education Success Services and Prof., Org. Behavior, King Graduate School, New Rochelle.  

The series features poetry, prose, memoir, essay, reportage, urban writing by African and African diasporan women. Past readers include Opal Palmer Adisa, Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, Pamela Booker, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Merle Collins, Lorraine Currelley, Carole Boyce Davies, Bridget Davis, LaTasha Diggs, Kim Coleman Foote, Ifeona Fulani, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Monica Hand, Eartha Watts Hicks, J.P. Howard, Linda Susan Jackson,  Pamela Jackson, Jacqueline Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Tayari Jones, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Nigeria Lockley, Diana McCaulay, Rosalind McLymont, Pam Mordecai, Elizabeth Nunez, Ebele Oseye, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Cecily Rodway, Gammy Singer, Danyel Smith, Patricia Smith, Martha Southgate, Eisa Ulen, and Tiphanie Yanique.

Be sure to mark your calendar for Yvette Louis, Mar 17; Farah Jasmine Griffin, Apr 21; Stephanie Renee Payne, May 5; Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, May 19; Cynthia Manick, June 9; and Celeste Rita Baker, June  23.

The venue, Calabar Imports Harlem, is generously provided by Atim Otun, and the series is co-sponsored by Mosaic Literary Magazine.   

Follow our blog at http://womenwritersofdiaspora.blogspot.com/.  Contact us for information or suggestions at womenwritersofdiaspora@gmail.com.

Come and meet our latest author, Kaitlyn Greenidge!

We are so pleased to continue the series and add writer KAITLYN GREENIDGE to our ever-growing list of African Diasporan women writers.  

When:  Thursday, January 20, 2016, 6pm

Where: Calabar Imports Harlem (corner of 134^th & Frederick Douglass Blvd)

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE DIASPORA has endeavored to provide exposure for established, newly-published, and soon-to-be-published Black women writers across all genres.  In some cases, our reading/discussion series provided early exposure to unpublished and first-published writers who have become well-known.  Past readers include Opal Palmer Adisa, Esther Armah, Keisha-Gaye Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop, Pamela Booker, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Merle Collins, Lorraine Currelley, Carole Boyce Davies, Bridget Davis, LaTasha Diggs, Kim Coleman Foote, Ifeona Fulani, Monica Hand, Eartha Watts Hicks, J.P. Howard, Linda Susan Jackson,  Pamela Jackson, Jacqueline Johnson, Patricia Spears Jones, Tayari Jones, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Nigeria Lockley, Cynthia Manick, Diana McCaulay, Rosalind McLymont, Pam Mordecai, Elizabeth Nunez, Ebele Oseye, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Cecily Rodway, Gammy Singer, Danyel Smith, Patricia Smith, Martha Southgate, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Eisa Ulen, and Tiphanie Yanique. 

In September 2015, ATIM OTUN offered Calabar Imports Harlem as a new venue for the series, and Editor RON KAVANAUGH’s Mosaic Magazine became co-sponsor. Please come out and support our efforts!