Contributors
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Contributors
ABBY AJAYI, who has been a Fulbright Scholar at the New York Film Academy, was born in London to Nigerian parents. She studied law at Oxford University before going to work at the BBC in drama script development. She has had short stories published in the Tell Tales Anthologies, and her writing for film and television has been broadcast on the BBC, Channel 4, and Hallmark USA. She is currently writing a film for Lionsgate and working on a longer fiction project.
AJA MONET BACQUIE, a Brooklyn, NY, native, has received a number of honors for her participation in poetry slams. A 2009 graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she received the MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2011). With Saul Williams and Dufflyn Lammers, she is one of the authors of Chorus (2012).
DESIREE BAILEY was born in Trinidad and Tobago and grew up in Queens, New York. She studied English and African studies at Georgetown University and is currently an MFA fiction candidate at Brown University. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2015, Muzzle Magazine, Blackberry, and other publications.
HEATHER BARKER was born in the United Kingdom and moved to Barbados as a preteen. In 2008 she received the George Lamming Prize for Literary Excellence for the short story, “Letter to Dee,” and in 2010 she was a finalist for Barbados’s foremost literary prize, the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including The Truth About Oranges and Other Works: A Winning Words Anthology (Barbados Foundation Publishing) and Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean (Peekash Press).
JENNIFER BARTELL, a teaching associate at Coastal Carolina University, graduated from Agnes Scott College in 2005 and received the MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina in 2014. She has published poetry and nonfiction prose in a number of periodicals, including pluck!: The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Blackberry, Jasper Magazine, and The Art of Medicine in Metaphors. She lives in Johnsonville, South Carolina.
LERONN P. BROOKS lives in New York City where he teaches courses in African and African American studies and art history at Lehman College of CUNY and New York University.
CHRISTI CARTWRIGHT is a writing lecturer in the Freshman Writing Program at Elmira College and holds an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University, an MBA in International Business from The University of The West Indies, and a BA in International Politics from Sussex University (UK). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Tongues of the Ocean and have been published by Poinciana Paper Press. She is a 2013 Paden Institute and Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and is currently at work on her debut collection of short stories set in Nassau, Bahamas, her hometown.
MARY JEAN CHAN, a TEDx speaker in 2012 at Swarthmore College, was recognized as an emerging poet during her graduate studies at the University of Oxford. She is currently an MA candidate in creative writing at Royal Holloway, the University of London. As Vice President of the Oxford University Poetry Society, she co-edits the Society’s termly journal [End Page 425] ASH. Her work has been published in journals and anthologies, including Cadaverine Magazine, The Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Small Craft Warnings, The Charnel House, and In Protest: 150 Poems for Humans Rights.
CHING-IN CHEN is author of The Heart’s Traffic and co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence within Activist Communities. This Kundiman and Lambda fellow is part of Macondo and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation writing communities, and was a participant in Sharon Bridgforth’s Theatrical Jazz Institute. Chen has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Can Serrat, Soul Mountain Retreat, Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay Colony, and the Norman Mailer Center.
JEREMY CLARK, a native of Louisville, Kentucky, completed his undergraduate degree in Pan-African studies at the University of Louisville, 2014. His work appears in Pluck!
AMA CODJOE, whose roots are in Memphis and Accra, was reared in Youngtown, Ohio. She has attended Cave Canem and was awarded the Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellowship at NYU...
