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. 

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