Readings from Tim Murphy, Joe Okonkwo & Mecca Jamilah Sulllivan.
Tim Murphy has reported on HIV/AIDS for twenty years, for such publications as Poz magazine, where he was an editor and staff writer, Out, Advocate, and New York magazine, where his July 2014 cover story on the new HIV-prevention pill regimen PrEP was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Magazine Article. He also covers LGBT issues, arts, pop culture, travel, and fashion for publications including the New York Times, ...
Readings from Tim Murphy, Joe Okonkwo & Mecca Jamilah Sulllivan.
Tim Murphy has reported on HIV/AIDS for twenty years, for such publications as Poz magazine, where he was an editor and staff writer, Out, Advocate, and New York magazine, where his July 2014 cover story on the new HIV-prevention pill regimen PrEP was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Magazine Article. He also covers LGBT issues, arts, pop culture, travel, and fashion for publications including the New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Details, and Yahoo! Style. He lives in Brooklyn and the Hudson Valley.
Joe Okonkwo is a Pushcart Prize nominee who has had stories published in a variety of print and online venues including Promethean, Penumbra Literary Magazine, Chelsea Station, Shotgun Honey, and Best Gay Stories 2015. In
addition to his writing career, he has worked in theater as an actor, stage manager, director, playwright and youth theater instructor. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from City College of New York. Jazz Moon is his debut novel.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015), a current finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Edmund White Award for LGBT Debut fiction. In her work, she explores the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young black women, through voice, music, and hip-hop inflected magical realist techniques. Her short stories have appeared in Best New Writing, American Fiction: Best New Stories by Emerging Writers, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, BLOOM: Queer Fiction, Art, Poetry and More, TriQuarterly, Feminist Studies All About Skin: Short Stories by Award-Winning Women Writers of Color, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing and many others. A current Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the Glenna Luschei Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, and fellowships, scholarships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she received a 2011 Emerging Writers Fellowship. Mecca is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at UMass Amherst. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University, and a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College. A proud native of Harlem, NY, her critical and scholarly work on sexuality, identity, and poetics in contemporary African Diaspora culture has appeared in publications including Palimpsest: Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, Jacket2, Public Books, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, From Uncle Tom’s Cabin the The Help: Critical Perspectives on White-Authored Narratives of Black Life, Ebony.com, Zora Magazine, TheRoot.com, Ms. Magazine online, and The Feminist Wire, where she serves as Associate Editor for Arts & Culture. Her research and scholarship have earned support from the Mellon-Mays Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, Williams College, where she received the Gaius Charles Bolin dissertation fellowship, and Rutgers University, where she was awarded the Postdoctoral Fellowship in African American and African Diaspora Literature. She is currently at work on a book manuscript exploring the relationships between sexuality, identity, and genre in contemporary women’s literature of the African Diaspora.