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