Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is a writer from Harlem, New York. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in publications from the US, the UK, and South Africa, including Callaloo, Best New Writing, Crab Orchard Review, The Minnesota Review, Bloom, Lumina, Philadelphia Stories, Baby Remember My Name, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing, X-24:Unclassified, and others. She has also published visual art, nonfiction, and critical reviews in GLQ, Baobab, and American Visions. She is the winner of the 2008 Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the 2006 William Gunn Fiction Award, and the 2001 James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award. Her other honors include Shortlist Finalist placement for the Eric Hoffer Prose award, Finalist placement for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers and the Gulf Coast Fiction Prize, and second place in the American Short Fiction Short Story Contest. A graduate of the Pan-African Literary Forum in Ghana and other workshops, Mecca has been awarded fiction scholarships, fellowships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Yaddo Colony, The Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, Temple University, and the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute. She holds a B.A. from Smith College and an M.A. from Temple University. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate and Dean’s Scholar in English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and is completing her first novel. (Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.)

American Fiction: Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers (New Rivers Press, 2012), 2010 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories (Del Sol Press, 2011), Woman's Work (GirlChild Press, 2010), Best New Writing 2010 (Hopewell Publications, 2009), X-24: Unclassified (Flipped eye, 2007), Baby Remember My Name (Carroll & Graf, 2006)

American Visions, Amistad, Baobab, Bloom, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Lumina, Minnesota Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Homeboy Review