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. 

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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