Notes on Contributors
- Notes on Contributors
TJ Benson is a creative photographer and a short story writer whose prose and nonfiction has been featured in online journals including The Kalahari Review, African Hadithi, Munyori Review, The Sentinel Literary Magazine and in The Contemporary Literary Review India, The Paragram ‘Remember’ Anthology and more recently in the Jalada Afrofuture Anthology. He is the founder of kaanem.com, a digital art space for expression among young people. He recently completed a collection of prose-poetry and parables titled The Devil’s Music and is currently at work on a novel titled The Madhouse.
Tommye Blount currently lives in Novi, Michigan—thirty minutes outside of his hometown of Detroit. A graduate from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, he has been the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Cave Canem and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the following publications: Black Tongue Review, Poetry, New England Review, Indiana Review, Vinyl, and elsewhere.
Bénédicte Boisseron, an Associate Professor at the University of Montana, is the author of Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora, recipient of the 2015 Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award. She is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled, Afro-Dog: The Animal Question in the Black Diaspora. Email: benedicte.boisseron@mso.umt.edu
Aaron Brown is a poet and novelist raised in Chad, who now calls Maryland home. He holds an MFA from the University of Maryland, and his work has been published in Warscapes, Tupelo Quarterly, The Portland Review, and Sojourners, among others. He is the author of the poetry chapbook Winnower (Wipf & Stock, 2013) and the novella Bound (2012). This fall he will join the faculty at Sterling College in Kansas as an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing. Email: aaron.brown.writer@gmail.com
Kenturah Davis is a Los Angeles artist who has produced work for exhibitions, artist collaborations, film, and commissions. The core of her work oscillates between portraiture and design, exploring themes related to the body and the formation of identities. Using the written word to make drawings came about during Davis’ detour away from painting, as a way to investigate the mechanics of the construction of our personal and collective identities. The process of writing a text in repetition to compose the portrait emerged as a metaphor for the way that we acquire and inhabit language. Exhibitions include a solo show at Papillion (Los Angeles) and group shows at the Yokohama Triennial (Japan), the Venice Biennale (Italy), and The Mistake Room (Los Angeles). Most recently, Davis was awarded a major public art commission for the new Crenshaw/LAX Metro line opening in 2016. [End Page 156]
Artist Charles Gaines earned his MFA from the School of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1967. Since 1989, Gaines has been a faculty member at the California Institute of the Arts. Based in Los Angeles, he is celebrated for his photographs, drawings, and works on paper that investigate how rules-based procedures construct order and meaning. Gaines was included in the 2007 Venice Biennale, followed by a 2008 exhibition at Kent Fine Art entitled Manifestos. As part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, Gaines was featured in two prominent Los Angeles exhibitions: Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, at the Hammer Museum and Under the Big Black Sun: 1974–1981 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Charles Gaines: Gridwork 1974–1999, the first exhibit to survey the artist’s early work, opened at The Studio Museum in Harlem in July 2014.
Kaitlyn Greenidge is originally from Boston. A graduate of Hunter College’s MFA Fiction program, she currently lives in Brooklyn. We Love You, Charlie Freeman is her first novel, forthcoming with Algonquin Press in June 2016.
His Excellency Issoufou Mahamadou is President of the Republic of Niger since April 7, 2010. He was born in 1952 in Dandaji, Illela (Tahoua, Niger). He is a Mathematician and Engineer (mining) by training and profession. H. E. Issoufou Mahamadou was the President of the National Party for Democracy and Socialism (PNDS-TAREYA) from 1990...
