2024 Fellow’s Bios

Emma Akpan is a writer who lives in Washington, DC, and was born in Toledo, Ohio. She is working on a novel about a thirteen year old girl in Toledo who uses hip-hop to navigate her difficult childhood, and a collection of short stories about women encountering gentrification in Washington, DC. She writes about girlhood, the unsaid, fugue and paths of escape, and agency for the powerless. When Emma is not writing, you can find her on a yoga mat, taking pictures, or making floral arrangements or finding the best cup of coffee. Emma has attended Tin House Workshop and Sackett Street workshops and is a scholarship recipient for Blue House Residency. Her writing has appeared in Reckon Magazine, TBD Health, Rewire News, The Raleigh News and Observer and The Root.

Akhir Ali: Based in New Jersey, akhir ali (they/she) is a high school English teacher and writer. They explore forgiveness and the unforgivable through surrealist and magical prose. ali is a recipient of the General Motors Future Fiction Collective Scholarship for Sci-Fi/Fantasy and a Michele Tolela Myers Fellow in Fiction. They received their MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

Tara Baldridge is a co-founder of Varia, a literary services company devoted to amplifying minority voices in literature through curated book sales and pop-up events. Her scope of work includes editing, book development, ghostwriting, and event/conference planning. Tara received her BA in English Language and literature from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Creative Writing from Roosevelt University. Tara’s work has been presented at the Humanities: Power and the Public Conference and published in Sugar Mule Literary Magazine, Midnight & Indigo Speculative Fiction Anthology – V2, and The Heartland Review.  Tara lives and writes in Chicago, but her southern roots are easily identifiable.

Corinne Brinkley is an MFA fiction student at the University of Maryland, and a 2023 alumna of the Tin House Summer Workshop. She has spent several years working as an advertising and marketing copywriter in New York City. Born and raised in Baltimore, MD, she believes summer evenings pair perfectly with steamed shellfish. A tennis enthusiast, Corinne attends the US Open annually, and for two weeks every January attempts to “live on Australian time” to watch all of the Australian Open matches.

Azaria Brown is a writer from Virginia. She writes about Black folk, for Black folk. She has an MFA from Butler University and her work has been published in RueScribe, Entropy Magazine, Honey Literary and Empyrean. She is currently a doctoral student in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her chapbook The Smiths of 115th Street is forthcoming from WTAW Press in 2024.

Elizabeth Bryant is a lifelong student of the Minnesota River Valley. Her writing explores black interiorities, especially in rural and small town environments in the midwest. She has studied history and black studies, and worked as a barista, literary nonprofit manager, nanny, publicist, events programmer, butcher, and farmer-trainee. Elizabeth is a founding member of the Minneapolis-based artist collective Burn Something, and a current MFA student in fiction at the University of Maryland.

James E Cherry is a licensed long term care administrator and co-owner of TLC Home Care Services, LLC. He is president of the Griot Collective of West Tennessee, a poetry workshop and founder of the Jazz Foundation of West Tennessee, a nonprofit dedicated to the promotion and perseverance of jazz and blues culture and music. A social critic and literary activist, he was instrumental in getting historical markers erected for Gil Scott-Heron, the 61st U.S. Colored Troops and Eliza Woods, a black woman lynched in Madison County, Tennessee in 1886. Cherry enjoys music, art, chess, reading and travel. He lives in Jackson, Tennessee with his wife, Tammy.

Jamiyla Chisholm is an author, journalist and educator. She is the author of the book The Community: A Memoir. Jamiyla has appeared in The New York Times, and her writing has been published by BET, Colorlines, Essence, TIME’S UP and other companies and publications. As a writer and editor, Jamiyla leads creative content and storytelling for New York City’s first women’s college and has created narratives that seek to empower people of color and the silenced. As an educator, Jamiyla teaches on the importance of storytelling to create positive narrative and social change.

Nia Dickens is a short story writer whose work centers on the weight of lineage, legacy, and land ownership through the prism of Black adolescence. In 2023, she received her M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Miami. She’s currently at work on a novel-in-stories about one of the last Black tobacco farmers in North Carolina and his grandchildren. Her work has earned support from Key West Literary Seminar, Martha’s Vineyard’s Institute of Creative Writing, Hurston/Wright Writer’s Workshop, Richard Hugo House, and VONA Voices. Outside of creative writing, she’s worked in education, first as a Fulbright Fellow in 2015 and more recently as an Academic Program Manager for Northwestern University. Dickens previously wrote for Technical.ly Media, an online tech news company based in the mid-Atlantic area and spent several years working for nonprofit organizations in Seattle, Washington. She currently resides in Miami, Florida.

Kami Enzie (he/him) is a Vienna-born, New Orleans-raised queer writer. He received an MFA in 2023 from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BA from Wesleyan University. He is an alum of the Tin House Winter Workshops, where he studied under Sidik Fofana and “The Coalition.” He worked in the NY art world prior to grad school, including at Yossi Milo Gallery where he co-curated the celebrated 2019 group exhibition of studio portraiture, African Spirits, including works by Samuel Fosso, Sanlé Sory, and Zanele Muholi, among others. He is currently in-between home cities and online at @yungwerther. The opportunity to be in fellowship with this year’s Retreat cohort and faculty has him grateful beyond the limits of expression.

Al-Lateef Farmer is an educator, imaginator and a native of the West End of Plainfield, New Jersey. His work is centered on the complexities and nuances of Black life. He has been a fellow with VONA (Summer 2023), Roots. Wounds. Words. Winter Writers Retreat (2024), Wild Seeds Retreat for Writers of Color (2024), and Kweli’s Art of the Short Story. He is currently working on a novel-in-stories and a short story collection, while sharpening his skills weekly with New York Writers Coalition Brother-to-Brother writing group for Black men, and the Weekend Words writing community. Al-Lateef has enjoyed a 20-year career in Higher Education working with New Jersey’s Educational Opportunity Fund and currently resides in South Jersey with his wife, Sharea.

Camille F. Forbes is a scholar and storyteller who holds an MA in History and a PhD in American Civilization from Harvard University. She is the author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Black Star, a critical biography reassessing the illustrious career of the misunderstood nineteenth-century Afro-Caribbean blackface comedian. A former Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and Hambidge fellow, Dr. Forbes has been published in Callaloo and Obsidian, and her fiction has been selected for The Best Peace Fiction social justice anthology. Her current project, Minding the Territory, is a novel set during the Civil War period that traces the fortunes and misfortunes of a young enslaved woman.

Ryane Nicole Granados is a Los Angeles native whose writing finds its roots in her love of community and her belief that Black motherhood is an act of social justice. Named the 2021 California Arts Council Established Writer Individual Arts Fellow, her work has been featured in various publications including Pangyrus, The Manifest-Station, The Nervous Breakdown, The Atticus Review, and LA Parent Magazine. Her storytelling has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and showcased in KPCC’s series Unheard LA. As the winner of the 2023 Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize, her novella, The Aves, will be published in 2024.

Oluwabambi Ige is a writer from Lagos, Nigeria. He has a MFA from Rutgers University. His work has won the Winter Tangerine Award for Prose, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in Agni, Story Magazine, Joyland, Columbia Journal. He is a 2024 Periplus fellow and a 2023 Bread Loaf Scholar. He is working on his first novel.

Toni Ann Johnson grew up in the conservative town of Monroe, NY. She graduated from high school a year early to attend New York University where she earned a BFA in Drama. Johnson began her career as an actress and playwright with recurring roles on two ABC soaps, an appearance in Spike Lee’s School Daze, multiple New York and regional theatre roles, and readings and productions of her plays, including The Negro Ensemble Company’s Here in My Father’s House, which she co-wrote. She moved to Los Angeles and brought a new play with which she won a fellowship to the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab. She subsequently wrote multiple produced projects: Ruby Bridges, Crown Heights, Step Up 2: The Streets, and others. After over a decade of Hollywood assignments, Johnson earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University and has since focused on short stories and novels. She’s a two-time finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, and a Flannery O’Connor Award Winner for short fiction. She’s been a fellow at Callaloo, and Hurston/Wright, and she’ll be doing a residency at The Atlantic Center for the Arts in May of 2024.

Yahaira Lawrence is a writer. She has been awarded residencies, fellowships, and received support from the Ucross Foundation, Monson Arts, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Tin House, The Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat, MacDowell, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. She’s working on a novel and a collection of short stories that focus on her Black and Latino culture and her upbringing in the South Bronx. She lives in New York.

Mary C. Lewis: I’m a lover of four non-publication activities. Cooking is one of them; I enjoy pursuing recipes and discovering ways to sustain a healthy lifestyle on a challenging budget. Another pastime involves cinema; I explore how film connects audiences with cultures, relationships, and settings, to name a few of the reasons to sit with a story. This leads me to a third favorite, books. I love opening a book and losing myself in the journey from beginning to end of characters (real and make-believe), conflicts, all that goes into making readers believe something is possible or can change. Speaking of change, my fourth activity, learning about the environment, has received a lot of incursions lately, from crowds jamming our national parks during the pandemic, to smoke-filled, dangerous air during the summer of 2023, to more crowds wearing weird glasses in 2024, staring upward and expecting something magical to transpire. Transfixed, I witnessed the conversation between moon and sun, and I felt grateful for robins feeding their young and plovers’ offspring returning to the home of their nest—parents gone but a memorial in process anyway

Hess Love is a lyrical writer who crafts stories that echo ancestral memory. They are an MFA candidate in Creative Writing while simultaneously under Arthur Flowers’s tutelage within the tradition of Literary Hoodoo. Hess’ work navigates Black interiors, geographies, and the remnants of Black spaces and people throughout history. They draw from their ritual experiences in place-based practices within the Chesapeake Bay region, descendant narratives, ethnoecology, and archaeology. Hess is a Sundress Best of the Net-nominated writer who has been honored with scholarships, fellowships, grants, residencies, and awards from Scribente Maternum at Lucille Clifton House, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, Tin House, Voices of Our Nation (VONA), Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Roots Wounds Words, Sundress Publications, Maryland State Arts Council, American Folklore Society, and Obsidian Foundation. They also serve as Curator of Black American Religion and Spirituality for The African American Folklorist Magazine.

Bruce Morrow’s artistic practice focuses on writing, filmmaking, and digital art. His first short film, IN DREAMS BEGIN…, won Best LGBTQ Jury and Audience Awards at the 2023 Paris Short Film Festival. As a nonprofit leader, he has worked with the Misty Copeland Foundation, The Trevor Project, GLAAD, Girl Scouts of the USA, Bank Street College of Education, and Teachers & Writers Collaborative. He holds a BS in Biology from RIT and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. He recently attended the Ragdale Artist Residency in Illinois and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont.  He is a former fiction editor at Callaloo and a co-editor of “Shade: An Anthology of Short Fiction by Gay Men of African Descent,” and his writing has been published in the New York Times, “Speak My Name: Black Men on Masculinity and the American Dream,” and “Freedom in this Village: Twenty-Five Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing.”

Tega Oghenechovwen is a Nigerian writer. He is currently in the MFA program at the University of Maryland, studying fiction. His writing exploring social justice, displacement and personal/communal grief has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Joyland, The Rumpus, Ruminate Magazine, Longreads and elsewhere. Tega has received fellowships from Ebedi International Writers’ Residency and African Writers Development Trust. He has also contributed editorial work to literary organizations including Africa in Dialogue, Barren Magazine, and Mukana Press.

Like many authors, Lolita Pierce’s impetus to write came from reading. Her early education came from damp boxes of paperbacks found in her neighbor’s basement. She encountered writers and their work when she was too young to be alone with them and was foolishly inspired. She is forever grateful for that neighbor’s basement library and the escape hatch that stories provided. As a graduate of Northwestern University and the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, Lolita has taken a circuitous route as a writer. She quit practicing law to homeschool her children. For a few years, she was a fiction editor at Literary Mama. Her first short story, “State of Rest,” was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Lolita writes and edits in Southern California where she is being raised by her four children who steadfastly encourage her and inspire her writing dream.

Jazz Sanchez lives in New York. She was a finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer’s Prize and a 2023 Associate Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her work has been supported by Kweli Journal, The Juniper Institute, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Grubstreet, and other institutions. She is working on a story collection and a novel.

Ayotola Tehingbola (she/her, b. ’93, Lagos) is a lawyer, photographer, writer and translator. Her writing has appeared/is forthcoming in Witness, CRAFT, Passages North, Quarterly West, etc., and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net Anthology. She is a two-time recipient of a Glenn Bach Award for Fiction, and her novel manuscript was shortlisted for the 2023 Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize for Debut Novel. She earned a Creative Writing MFA from Boise State University and has been supported by the Lagos International Poetry Festival, Hudson Valley Writers Center, GrubStreet Center for Creative Writing, Alexa Rose Foundation and Idaho Commission on the Arts.

Damieka Thomas is an MFA student at University of California, Davis. She is a mixed-race (Black, Native, and White) writer and poet. She holds a degree in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing and a minor in Education from UC Davis. She was born in Clear Lake and bounced around various places, including New York, Arizona, and Kentucky, but she mostly has family in Mendocino and Sutter county. She has been published in The Noyo Review, Glassworks, Poets.org, Rejected Lit Magazine, and Open Ceilings Magazine. She is the recipient of the 2021 Celeste Turner Wright Prize for Poetry and the 2021 Diana Lynn Bogart Prize for Fiction from UC Davis. In her spare time, Damieka enjoys reading, writing, hiking, yoga, traveling, and indulging in the frequent Netflix binge with her cat by her side. You can find her @damiekat on all social media platforms.

Julie Upshur is a writer, equestrian, and long-distance runner from middle Tennessee. Growing up with nine siblings, she always found her me-time in a book, whether it was taking her to the Grand National to steeplechase horses, into a magic treehouse to visit the time of the dinosaurs, or on a grand sleuthing adventure. In real life, she’s competed horses in three-day eventing, the “triathlon of horse sports,” where she was honored to be a representative for Black equestrians. She’s taught preschoolers. She’s trained for and run multiple half and full marathons. And through it all, she writes. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University, where she found the phrase “playful workaholic” a perfect description of her. She’ll happily work on one of her novels for twelve hours straight, then go for mimosas with the girls and rot on the couch for a day. She wants her fiction to imitate life, in that it is nuanced, messy, maddening, and exquisite.

Robert J. Williams is the author of the short story collection Strivers and Other Stories, winner of the 2016 Washington Writers’ Publishing House (WWPH) Fiction Prize.  His work has also recently appeared in the Callaloo literary journal and the anthology This is What America What America Looks Like (WWPH). He is the recipient of four Larry Neal Writers’ Awards given by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and one of his novel manuscripts was shortlisted for the 2022 Sante Fe Writers Project Literary Awards and also a 2023 Letter Review Prize. A native of Augusta, Georgia, Robert is a graduate of Northwestern and the University of Georgia’s Graduate School of Journalism and Mass Communications. He currently resides in Washington, D.C. where he heads digital communications strategy and operations for a global research consulting firm.

Carlos D. Williamson is a reporter and Racial Justice Fellow for the Evanston RoundTable. He earned a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and received a Fulbright U.S. Student Award to Brazil, where he wrote about race, culture and class. He currently covers the Reparations Committee, the Equity and Empowerment Commission, police reform and other issues for the RoundTable. His journalism, non-fiction, and fiction have appeared in Folha de S.Paulo, the Chicago Tribune, the RoundTable, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Heavy Feather Review, Puerto del Sol, and more. (NB: Carlos was announced in 2024 but was unable to attend.)