Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the author of the forthcoming short story collection, Blue Talk and Love. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, Best New Writing, American Fiction: Best Unpublished Stories by Emerging Writers, Crab Orchard Review, Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, Lumina, BLOOM, Philadelphia Stories, and others. She is the winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, and honors from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, American Short Fiction, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she was awarded the 2011 Emerging Writer fellowship. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams College, where she teachers courses on poetics and identity in literature of the African Diaspora.