Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of the forthcoming short story collection, Blue Talk and Love. In her fiction, she explores the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young women of color, through voice, music, and hip-hop-inflected magical realism. Her short stories have 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, All About Skin: Short Stories by Award-Winning Women Writers, 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 other honors 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. She is Associate Editor for Arts & Culture at The Feminist Wire, and her critical essays on blackness and sexuality in contemporary culture have appeared on Ebony.com, The Scholar & Feminist, Public Books, TheRoot.com, and others. She earned her Doctorate degree in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and is an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst.

Twitter: @mecca_jamilah