African Voices Summer 2017 AV Summer 2017 Digital Issue | Page 6

Contributors Bios
Mawiyah Kai EL-Jamah Bomani
is a native New Orleanian Writer and Spirit Woman. Mawiyah’s
writings have appeared in The Crab Orchard Review, Dark Eros,
Catch The Fire, Freeform Magazine, Beyond The Frontier, Kente
Cloth, Fertile Ground, Family Portraits, Chicken Bones: A Literary
Journal, Survival Digest Quarterly, From A Bend In The River,
Thicker Than Water, The House of Misfit’s Guide to Spiritual
Enlightenment, Essence Magazine, Keeping it Hushed: The
Barbershop African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric, Looking
for Soul, Black Poetry Music, The Louisiana Poetry Project and
Women’s Issues and Feminism in the 21st Century. She wrote
the plays “Brown Blood Black Womb.” She is also writer of the
plays “Spring Chicken,” “Crows Feet,” “Bourbon and Hair
Anthem.” She won playwright of the year for her play “Spring
Chicken,” in 2013.
Mitchell L. H. Douglas
is the author of Cooling Board: A Long-Playing Poem and \blak\
\al-fə bet\. His next poetry collection, dying in the scarecrow’s
arms, is forthcoming from Persea Books in 2018. Douglas’ poem
“After Murder” is featured on africanvoices.com.
Angel C. Dye
is a poet from Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas by way of Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. She is a graduate of Howard University and is an
MFA in Creative Writing candidate at the University of Kentucky.
Her poetry has appeared in Sixfold Journal, Black Earth
Institute’s About Place Journal, and 2 Leaf Press’ Black Lives
Have Always Mattered anthology. Angel has been awarded by
the Middle Atlantic Writers Association, the College Language
Association, and Tuckson Health Connections. Her work
grapples with such issues as living in poverty and living in a
single parent home with an incarcerated parent.
Ozimede Sunny Ekhalume
is a pharmacist and an author. His fiction has appeared in The
Missing Slate, Kalahari Review, African Writer, Café Aphra,
Poetry Pacific, Winamop and Africa Book Club. His storybook
for children was shortlisted for the 2016 Association of Nigerian
Authors (ANA) Prize for Children’s Literature. Ekhalume is
currently working on a collection of short stories and a novel.
Sherese Francis
is a southeast Queens-based published poet, writer, blogger
and literary curator. She has published work in journals and
anthologies including Newtown Literary, Blackberry Magazine,
Kalyani Magazine, Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Arts
Inspired by Octavia Butler and Bared: Contemporary Poetry
and Art on Bras and Breasts. Her current projects include her
Afrofuturism-inspired blog, Futuristically Ancient; her southeast
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african Voices
Queens based pop up bookshop/mobile library, J. Expressions,
for which she received a 2017 Queens Council on the Arts grant;
an upcoming fantasy novel, The E; and poetry collections in
progress, “And the Water Breaks” and “Lady Liberty.”
N. Steven Harris: See page 33.
Roman Johnson
is a Watering Hole fellow, and winner of the 2015 George
Rufus Lindsey Scholarship for Male Poets. He loves sweet
potato pie, gumbo, and shrimp and grits. He is proud to be
from Memphis, Tennessee.
Quincy Scott Jones’
work has appeared in publications such as the African
American Review, The North American Review, and The
Feminist Wire, as well the anthologies such as Resisting Arrest:
Poems to Stretch the Sky and Red Sky: Poetry on the Global
Epidemic of Violence Against Women. He is a Cave Canem
Fellow and a VONA alumna. With Nina Sharma, he co-created
the Nor’easter Exchange: a multicultural, multi-city reading
series. His first book, The T-Bone Series, was published by
Whirlwind Press in 2009.
Afua Richardson: See The Gallery, page 22.
Sheree Renée Thomas
is the author of Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct
Press, named on the 2016 James Tiptree, Jr. Award “Worthy”
List and honored with a Publishers Weekly Starred Review)
and Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems. She is the editor of
the groundbreaking anthologies, Dark Matter: A Century of
Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (winner of the
2001 World Fantasy Award) and Dark Matter: Reading the
Bones (winner of the 2005 World Fantasy Award). Her work has
been translated in French, Urdu, and Spanish and her essays,
articles, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times and
other publications. Based in Memphis, Tennessee, Thomas is the
Associate Editor of Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora.
Lynne Thompson
is the author of Start With a Small Guitar and Beg No Pardon,
winner of the Perugia Book Award and the Great Lakes
Colleges New Writers Award. Recent work has appeared in
Poetry, Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, African American Review,
and Crab Creek Review, among others. Thompson is Reviews &
Essays Editor for the literary journal, Spillway. She is winner of
2017 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Prize, and the Stephen
Dunn Poetry Prize in 2016. She received a Master Artist
Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles for 2015-16.