Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the author of the novel Big Girl, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and a best books pick from Time, Essence, Vulture, Ms., Goodreads, Library Reads, and SheReads.com. Her previous books are The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2021), the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015), winner of the Judith Markowitz Award for Fiction from Lambda Literary. Mecca 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. In her fiction, she explores the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young Black women through voice, music, and hip-hop inflected magical realist techniques. Her short stories have appeared in Best New Writing, Kenyon Review, 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, DC Metro Weekly, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing, and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the Glenna Luschei Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, the 2021 Pride Index National Arts and Culture award, and honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, Lambda Literary, the Publishing Triangle, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she received an inaugural Emerging Writers Fellowship.
A proud native of Harlem, NY, Sullivan’s scholarly work explores the connections between sexuality, identity, and creative practice in contemporary African Diaspora literatures and cultures. Her scholarly and critical writing has appeared in New York Magazine’s The Cut, American Literary History, Feminist Studies, Black Futures, Teaching Black, American Quarterly, College Literature, Oxford African American Resource Center, Palimpsest: Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, Jacket2, Public Books, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, Sinister Wisdom, The Scholar and Feminist, Women’s Studies, College Literature, The Rumpus, BET.com, Ebony.com, TheRoot.com, Ms. Magazine online, The Feminist Wire, and others. Her research and scholarship have earned support from the Mellon-Mays Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, Williams College, Rutgers University, Duke University, the American Academy of University Women, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation).
Her debut novel, Big Girl (W.W. Norton & Co./ Liveright 2022) was selected as the July 2022 Phenomenal Book Club pick, a WNYC Radio 2022 Debut pick, and a New York Public Library “Book of the Day.” Of the novel, author Kiese Laymon says, “There are three books on earth that I would give anything to be able to write and reread until the suns burns us up. Big Girl is one of those books,” while author and activist Janet Mock observes: “Big Girl gifts us a heroine carrying the weight of worn-out ideas who dares to defy the compulsion to shrink, and in turn teaches us to pursue our fullest, most desirous selves without shame.”
Mecca is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses in African American poetry and poetics, Black queer and feminist literatures, and creative writing. She lives in Washington, DC.
