Barbara Smith was born and raised in Toronto and lived most of her life in Edmonton. She settled in the Victoria area in 2006 with her husband, Bob. They have two daughters and two grandsons. Barbara has always collected folklore stories. Following her job on the Edmonton school board, she has been a full-time writer since 1988. Her work is inspired by a love of mystery, combined with her lifelong interest in social history. She has published over thirty books, the majority regional true ghost stories. They include: Ghost Stories Of Manitoba, Campfire Stories Of Western Canada, Ghost Stories Of Alberta, Ghost Stories And Mysterious Creatures Of British Columbia, Ghost Stories Of The Rocky Mountains, and Canadian Ghost Stories. Barbara was featured on the Discovery Channel's "Hunt For the Mad Trapper". She continues to publish, give readings, and interviews. Canadian Ghost Stories came out in November 2018. http://www.superstitioustimes.com/can...

American journalist, teacher, playwright and poet who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. She was one of the first women of color to have a play publicly performed. Not to be confused with her great-aunt Angelina Emily Grimké, an abolitionist author.

Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist, and conceptual-video artist. She is the author of four books of poems: Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House, 2017); Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015); which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE (Nightboat Books, 2011); A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007); and three limited edition chapbooks. Most recently, she co-edited with Erica Hunt an anthology, Letters to the Future: BLACK WOMEN / Radical WRITING (Kore Press, 2018). Her nonfiction can be found in The New Yorker, Harper's, n+1, and elsewhere. Martin is a Professor of English in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is also the recipient of a 2018 NEA Grant in Creative Writing.

Jewelle Gomez (b. 1948 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American writer and cultural worker. Gomez was raised by her great grandmother, Grace, who was born on Indian land in Iowa to an African American mother and Ioway father. Grace returned to New England before she was 14 when her father died and was married to John E. Morandus, a Wampanoag and descendent of Massasoit, the sachem for whom Massachusetts was named. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s she was shaped socially and politically by the close family ties with her great grandmother, Grace and grandmother Lydia. Their history of independence as well as marginalization in an African American community are threaded throughout her work. Her high school and college years were ripe with Black political and social movements which is reflected in much of her writing. Subsequent years in New York City placed her at the heart of Black theatre including work with the Frank Silvera Writers Workshop and many years as a stage manager for off Broadway productions. There she became involved in lesbian feminist activism and magazine publication. She was a member of the Conditions (magazine) Collective, a lesbian feminist literary magazine. More recent writing has begun to reflect her Native American (Ioway, Wampanoag) heritage. Her work lives at the intersection of these multiple ethnicities, the ideals of lesbian/feminism and class. Gomez is the author of seven books, but is most known for the double Lambda Literary Award winning novel The Gilda Stories (Firebrand Books, 1991). This novel, which reframes the traditional vampire mythology, taking a lesbian feminist perspective, is an adventure about an escaped slave who comes of age over two hundred years. According to scholar, Elyce Rae Helford, "Each stage of Gilda's personal voyage is also a study of life as part of multiple communities, all at the margins of mainstream white middle-class America." (UTOPIAN STUDIES, 3.22.01) She also authored the theatrical adaptation of the novel Bones and Ash which toured 13 U.S. cities performed by the Urban Bush Women Company (1996). The book, which remains in print, was also issued by the Quality Paperback Book Club in an edition including the play. Her other books include Don't Explain , a collection of short fiction; 43 Septembers , a collection of personal/political essays; Oral Tradition , poems collected and new. Her fiction and poetry is included in over one hundred anthologies including the first anthology of Black speculative fiction, Dark Matter: A Century of African American Speculative Fiction , from Warner Books, edited by Sheree R. Thomas; Home Girls: a Black feminist Anthology from Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press and Best American Poetry of 2001 edited by Robert Haas. Gomez has written literary and film criticism for numerous publications including The Village Voice, The San Francisco Chronicle, Ms. Magazine and Black Scholar. She's been interviewed in periodicals and journals over the past 25 years including Advocate, where writer Victoria Brownworth discussed her writing origins and political insterests (September 21, 1993). In the Journal of Lesbian Studies (Vol. 5, #3) she was interviewed for an article entitled "Funding Lesbian Activism," which linked her career in philanthropy with her political roots. She's also interviewed in the 1999 film produced for Public Television, After Stonewall, directed by John Scagliotti. Her newest work includes a forthcoming comic novel, Televised, which recounts the lives of survivors of the Black Nationalist movement and was excerpted in the anthology Gumbo edited by Marita Golden and E. Lyn Harris. She is also authoring a play about James Baldwin being written in collaboration with [a: Harry Waters

Michelle Cliff (born 2 November 1946) is a Jamaican-American author whose notable works include No Telephone to Heaven, Abeng and Free Enterprise. Cliff also has written short stories, prose poems and works of literary criticism. Her works explore the various, complex identity problems that stem from post-colonialism, as well as the difficulty of establishing an authentic, individual identity despite race and gender constructs. Cliff is a lesbian who grew up in Jamaica. Cliff was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1946 and moved with her family to New York City three years later. She was educated at Wagner College and the Warburg Institute at the University of London. She has held academic positions at several colleges including Trinity College and Emory University. Cliff was a contributor to the Black feminist anthology Home Girls. As of 1999, Cliff was living in Santa Cruz, California, with her partner, poet Adrienne Rich. The two were partners from 1976; Rich died in 2012. (from Wikipedia)

Kai Davis is a writer, performer, and teaching artist from Philadelphia. In 2016 she received her Bachelors in both African American Studies and English. Between 2012 and 2016 Kai Davis was the Artistic Director of The Babel Poetry Collective. She has performed for TEDX Philly, CNN, BET, PBS, and NPR, among others. She is a two time international grand slam champion, winning Brave New Voices in 2011 and The College Union Poetry Slam Invitational in 2016. She is a 2017 Leeway Transformation Award Recipient. Right now she is a member of the Philadelphia Poet Laureate Committee and spends most of her time working as Poetry Editor for Apiary Magazine and Co-host/Artistic Director for The Philly Pigeon. She visits high schools and local non-profit organizations, teaching poetry to marginalized and under-served young folk. When she is not in Philly, she tours colleges and universities across the country, performing her original work and facilitating writing workshops. As a Queer Woman of Color, much of her work deals with the topics of race, gender, power, sexuality and its many layers. She aims to explore how it affects who we are, who we will become, and how we love.

As a young girl growing up in Trinidad, Dionne Brand submitted poems to the newspapers under the pseudonym Xavier Simone, an homage to Nina Simone, whom she would listen to late at night on the radio. Brand moved to Canada when she was 17 to attend the University of Toronto, where she earned a degree in Philosophy and English, a Masters in the Philosophy of Education and pursued PhD studies in Women’s History but left the program to make time for creative writing. Dionne Brand first came to prominence in Canada as a poet. Her books of poetry include No Language Is Neutral, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award and thirsty, finalist for the Griffin Prize and winner of the Pat Lowther Award for poetry. Brand is also the author of the acclaimed novels In Another Place, Not Here, which was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award, and At the Full and Change of the Moon. Her works of non-fiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return. What We All Long For was published to great critical acclaim in 2005. While writing the novel, Brand would find herself gazing out the window of a restaurant in the very Toronto neighbourhood occupied by her characters. “I’d be looking through the window and I’d think this is like the frame of the book, the frame of reality: ‘There they are: a young Asian woman passing by with a young black woman passing by, with a young Italian man passing by,” she says in an interview with The Toronto Star. A recent Vanity Fair article quotes her as saying “I’ve ‘read’ New York and London and Paris. And I thought this city needs to be written like that, too.” In addition to her literary accomplishments, Brand is Professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/dionne-b...

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the author of the novel Big Girl, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and a best books pick from Time, Essence, Vulture, Ms., Goodreads, Library Reads, and SheReads.com. Her previous books are The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (University of Illinois Press, 2021), the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015), winner of the Judith Markowitz Award for Fiction from Lambda Literary. Mecca 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. In her fiction, 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, Kenyon Review, 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, DC Metro Weekly, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing, and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the Glenna Luschei Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, the 2021 Pride Index National Arts and Culture award, and honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, Lambda Literary, the Publishing Triangle, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she received an inaugural Emerging Writers Fellowship. A proud native of Harlem, NY, Sullivan’s scholarly work explores the connections between sexuality, identity, and creative practice in contemporary African Diaspora literatures and cultures. Her scholarly and critical writing has appeared in New York Magazine’s The Cut, American Literary History, Feminist Studies, Black Futures, Teaching Black, American Quarterly, College Literature, Oxford African American Resource Center, Palimpsest: Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, Jacket2, Public Books, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, Sinister Wisdom, The Scholar and Feminist, Women’s Studies, College Literature, The Rumpus, BET.com, Ebony.com, TheRoot.com, Ms. Magazine online, The Feminist Wire, and others. Her research and scholarship have earned support from the Mellon-Mays Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, Williams College, Rutgers University, Duke University, the American Academy of University Women, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation). Her debut novel, Big Girl (W.W. Norton & Co./ Liveright 2022) was selected as the July 2022 Phenomenal Book Club pick, a WNYC Radio 2022 Debut pick, and a New York Public Library “Book of the Day.” Of the novel, author Kiese Laymon says, “There are three books on earth that I would give anything to be able to write and reread until the suns burns us up. Big Girl is one of those books,” while author and activist Janet Mock observes: “Big Girl gifts us a heroine carrying the weight of worn-out ideas who dares to defy the compulsion to shrink, and in turn teaches us to pursue our fullest, most desirous selves without shame.” Mecca is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses in African American poetry and poetics, Black queer and feminist literatures, and creative writing. She lives in Washington, DC.

Audre Lorde was a revolutionary Black feminist. Lorde's poetry was published very regularly during the 1960s—in Langston Hughes' 1962 New Negro Poets, USA; in several foreign anthologies; and in black literary magazines. During this time, she was politically active in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet's Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde "does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone." Her second volume, Cables to Rage (1970), which was mainly written during her tenure at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, addressed themes of love, betrayal, childbirth and the complexities of raising children. It is particularly noteworthy for the poem "Martha", in which Lorde poetically confirms her homosexuality: "[W]e shall love each other here if ever at all." Later books continued her political aims in lesbian and gay rights, and feminism. In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherríe Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of colour. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992. Read More

Akasha Gloria Hull (born December 6, 1944) is a poet, educator, writer, and critic whose work in African-American literature and as a Black feminist activist has helped shape Women’s Studies. As one of the architects of Black Women's Studies, her scholarship and activism has increased the prestige, legitimacy, respect, and popularity of feminism and African-American studies. Dr. Hull has been a professor of women's studies and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Delaware, and the University of the West Indies, Mona, in Kingston, Jamaica. She has published four books, a monograph, three edited collections, over twenty articles in peer-reviewed professional journals, numerous chapters in a dozen volumes, fifteen book reviews, poems in more than thirty magazines and anthologies, and two short stories. Her first novel, Neicy, is due for release in late 2012. She lives in Little Rock, Arkansas (USA). (from Wikipedia)

The Reverend Dr. Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray (November 20, 1910 – July 1, 1985) was an American civil rights activist, women's rights activist, lawyer, and author. She was also the first black woman ordained an Episcopal priest. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Murray was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents. At the age of sixteen, she moved to New York to attend Hunter College, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1933. In 1940, Murray was arrested with a friend for violating Virginia segregation laws after they sat in the whites-only section of a bus. This incident, and her subsequent involvement with the socialist Workers' Defense League, inspired her to become a civil rights lawyer, and she enrolled at Howard University. During her years at Howard, she became increasingly aware of sexism, which she called "Jane Crow", the sister of the Jim Crow racial segregation laws. Murray graduated first in her class, but was denied the chance to do further work at Harvard University because of her gender. In 1965 she became the first African American to receive a J.S.D. from Yale Law School. As a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women's rights. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall called Murray's 1950 book States' Laws on Race and Color the "bible" of the civil rights movement. Murray served on the 1961 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women and in 1966 was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Ruth Bader Ginsburg later named Murray a coauthor on a brief for Reed v. Reed in recognition of her pioneering work on gender discrimination. Murray held faculty or administrative positions at the Ghana School of Law, Benedict College, and Brandeis University. In 1973, Murray left academia for the Episcopal Church, becoming a priest, and was named an Episcopal saint in 2012. Murray struggled with issues related to her sexual and gender identity, describing herself as having an "inverted sex instinct"; she had a brief, annulled marriage to a man and several relationships with women, and in her younger years, occasionally passed as a teenage boy. In addition to her legal and advocacy work, Murray published two well-reviewed autobiographies and a volume of poetry. (from Wikipedia)

Shockley is a black feminist theorist, novelist, and librarian. Shockley’s extensive contributions to black literature in general and black queer literature and politics more specifically, have broken ground in the vast wilderness of works that do not exist. Shockley has written reference books, nonfiction and fiction for newspapers and journals, as well as book reviews, essays, novels, and a collection of short stories. She was born on June 21, 1927, in Louisville, Kentucky. She began publishing short stories in 'The Louisville Defender' at age eighteen. After receiving a B.A. at Fisk University, Shockley went on to pursue an M.A. in Library Science at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She has worked at Delaware State College, the University of Maryland, and at Fisk University where she works as the curator for African American collections.