Biography
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D, is a former Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst, and is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. She received her Ph.D in English Literature from University of Pennsylvania, as well as an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University and a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College. She was born and raised in Harlem, New York.
An accomplished fiction and scholarly writer, Sullivan has received numerous awards, scholarships, and fellowships for her work. Among these awards are the Charles Johnson Fiction Award and the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award. She is also the recipient of the Gaius Charles Bolin dissertation fellowship from Williams College, the Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American and African Diaspora Literature from Rutgers University, and a 2011 Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Center for Fiction in New York City.
Much of Sullivan’s work, in terms of fiction, centers around sexuality and identity within the African Diaspora, often with a touch of magical realism. Her most recent work, Blue Talk and Love, is a multi-genre collection of short stories that explores the lives of several Black women and girls and the trials and triumphs that they face through magical realism, historical fiction, and satire. Blue Talk and Love was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.
Her critical and scholarly work has appeared in numerous publications such as American Quarterly; Palimpsest: Journal of Women, Gender, and the Black International; The Scholar and Feminist; and American Literary History.
Sullivan continues to write thought-provoking and emotionally impactful short fiction and critical essays and is currently working on a project titled The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora.
Selected Bibliography
Essays and Articles
How to Be Black in the Age of Obama, George Zimmerman, and Paula Deen: Notes From Summer, 2013 (link): The Feminist Wire. Ebony.com (Reprint) The Root (Reprint)
Black Queer Gender and Pariah’s “Grand Swagger” (link): The Feminist Wire.
“Unsayable Secrets” of Diaspora’s Bodily History (link): (Roundtable essay on M. NourbeSe Philip). Jacket2.
Short Stories
“Powder and Smoke” in BLOOM, 2005.
“Sererie” in Callaloo, 2010
“Wall Woman” in Woman’s Work, 2010.
Blue Talk and Love, 2015. (Short story anthology)
“The Anvil” in Feminist Studies, 2018.
Websites and Social Media
Website: http://www.meccajamilahsullivan.com/ (link)
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mecca_jamilah (link)
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/meccajamilahsullivan/ (link)
Excerpt from “Sererie” read by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan at the annual Bread Loaf “Dark Tower” reading in 2011 at Sunday Salon in New York City. Content Warning: mentions of slavery and racial slurs.