Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is from Harlem, New York. Her fiction and reviews have appeared internationally in publications including Callaloo, American Fiction, Best New Writing, Crab Orchard Review, Bloom, Lumina, Amistad, The Minnesota Review, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing, American Visions, GLQ and The Feminist Wire, where she writes as an Editorial Collective member. She is the recipient of fellowships and honors from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, and a 2011 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship. She is the Williams College Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, completing her dissertation on identity and poetics in contemporary women’s literature of the African Diaspora. Her short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, is forthcoming from Flipped-eye/Lubin & Kleyner in 2012.