Assistant Professor Mecca Jamilah Sullivan of the Department of Literatures in English was recently named the 2021 Pride Index Esteem Awards national honoree in the Artistic Expression category.
Since 2007, PrideIndex.com’s Esteem Awards has honored local and national organizations and individuals for their continued efforts in supporting the African-American and LGBT communities in the areas of entertainment, media, civil rights, business, and art.
Sullivan is the author of the short story collection Blue Talk and Love and winner of the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary. 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; 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 2016 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 won 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.
At Bryn Mawr, Sullivan teaches courses in African American poetry and poetics, Black feminist literature, and creative writing. Her scholarly book, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (University of Illinois Press 2021), explores the politics of experiment in Black queer and feminist literary cultures. She is currently completing a novel.