All about Skin (44 page)

ZZ Packer
was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and Louisville, Kentucky. She currently lives in Austin, Texas. Her stories have appeared in the
New Yorker, Harper's, Story, Ploughshares, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories 2000, Best American Short Stories 2003
, and NPR's Selected Shorts series. Her nonfiction has appeared in the
New York Times Magazine, Essence, O Magazine
, and the
New York Times Book Review.
She is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a Whiting Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her book
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
(2003) won the Commonwealth First Fiction Award and an Alex Award. It became a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was selected for the Today Show Book Club by John Updike. She is currently at work on a novel about the Buffalo Soldiers, titled “The Thousands,” an excerpt of which appeared in the
New Yorker
's “20 Under 40” fiction issue under the title “Dayward.”

Princess Joy L. Perry
is a senior lecturer of composition, American literature, and creative writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. A 2010 Pushcart Prize nominee, her fiction has appeared in
Kweli Journal, Harrington Gay Men's Literary Quarterly
, and twice in
African American Review
. In 2011 she was a Tobias Wolff Award in Fiction finalist and garnered an honorable mention from the
Common Review
's first annual Short Story Prize in the summer of 2010. She is a past recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship and a winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award.

Toni Margarita Plummer
is a winner of the Miguel Mármol Prize and a finalist for the Mariposa Award. She is the author of
The Bolero of Andi Rowe
(2011), a story collection set in her hometown of South El Monte, California. Her fiction has appeared in
Thema, PALABRA
, and
Kweli Journal
, and she is a contributor to the anthology
Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education
. Plummer attended the University of Notre Dame and earned a Master of Professional Writing from USC. An editor at a major publisher, Plummer lives with her husband in New York.

Emily Raboteau
is the author of a work of creative nonfiction,
Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora
(2013), and a novel,
The Professor's Daughter
(2005). Her fiction and essays have been widely published and anthologized in such places as
Best American Short Stories, Best African American Fiction, Best American Nonrequired Reading
, the
Believer, Tin House
, the
Guardian
, and
Guernica
. As an associate professor of creative writing at the City College of New York, she lives in New York City with her husband and two kids, both of whom were born at home under water.

Ivelisse Rodriguez
has published work in the
Boston Review
, the
Quercus Review, Ragazine, Vandal, Asterix
, and
Kweli
. In December 2010 she was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes for her fiction. She holds a PhD in English–creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. She is an assistant professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City. She has finished a collection of short stories titled “Love War Stories,” and is working on a novel about the African diaspora and a novella about salsa music.

Metta Sáma
is the author of
Nocturne Trio
(2012) and
South of Here
(2005, published under her legal name, Lydia Melvin). Her poems, fiction, creative nonfiction, and book reviews have been published or are forthcoming in
Black
bird, bluestem, Drunken Boat
, the
Drunken Boat, Esque, Her Circle
magazine,
Jubilat, Kweli Journal
, the
Owls, Pebble Lake Review, Pyrta, Reverie, Sententia
, and
Vinyl
, among others. She is an assistant professor of creative writing and the director of the Center for Women Writers at Salem College.

Joshunda Sanders
is a writer and journalist whose work has been widely anthologized, and her essays have appeared in the
San Francisco Chronicle, Gawker, Huizache, Salon
, and the
Week
. Her reporting and writing has also appeared in the
UTNE Reader
, the
Dallas Morning News, Bitch
magazine,
Kirkus Reviews
, and
Publishers Weekly
. “Sirens” first appeared in the
Bellevue Literary Review
. She blogs at
www.joshunda.com
.

Renee Simms
's stories and essays have appeared in
North American Review, Hawai‘i Review, Salon, Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers
, and elsewhere. A Michigan native, she currently lives in Washington, where she teaches writing and African American literature at the University of Puget Sound. She has received fellowships, contributorships, honors, and prizes from
storySouth, Inkwell Journal
, the PEN Center, the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Arizona Humanities Council, the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, and Cave Canem. She currently lives in Washington and teaches writing and African American studies at the University of Puget Sound.

Rochelle Spencer
's work appears in several publications including
Mosaic Literary Magazine, Callaloo
, the
African American Review, Publishers Weekly, Poets & Writers
, the
Rumpus
, and
Crab Creek Review
, which nominated her nonfiction for an Editor's Choice Award and a Pushcart Prize. Rochelle has taught at Spelman College, New York University, LaGuardia Community College, and the College of New Rochelle, and she is a board member of the Hurston-Wright Foundation, a founding member of the Harlem Works Collective, and a member of the Winter green Writers Collective and the National Book Critics Circle. Rochelle is currently co authoring a non fiction book about the members of the Dark Room Collective and completing a doctorate on Afro-surrealist texts. For more information, visit
www.rochellespencer.com
or
www.twitter.com/rochellespencer
.

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
's fiction has appeared in
Callaloo, Best New Writing, The Best Unpublished Stories by Emerging Writers
(
American Fiction
, vol. 12, 2012),
Crab Orchard Review, Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, BLOOM, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner
, and others. She is a winner of the Charles Johnson Fiction Award and the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, and has earned honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook,
American Short Fiction
, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she was awarded the 2011 Emerging Writer Fellowship. She is currently an assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where her research focuses on poetics and identity in women's literature of the African diaspora. Her short-story collection,
Blue Talk and Love
, will be published in 2014.

Hope Wabuke
is a mom and writer who runs a communications company called The WriteSmiths. She is also the director of media and communications for the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction and a blogger for
Ms. Magazine
. Her work has been featured in the
Daily Beast, Salon, Gawker, Ms. Magazine
online, the
Feminist Wire
, and
Kalyani Magazine
, among others. A New York Times Foundation Fellow, Hope has also received fellowships from the Voices of our Nations Arts Foundation and from Cave Canem.

Xu Xi
is the author of nine books of fiction and essays. The most recent titles are
Access Thirteen Tales
(2011); the novel
Habit of a Foreign Sky
(2010), a finalist for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize; and an essay collection,
Evanescent Isles
(2008). She is currently Writer-in-Residence at City University of Hong Kong's Department of English, where she established and directs Asia's first, international low-residency MFA in creative writing that also focuses on writing of, from, and out of Asia. For more information, visit
www.xuxiwriter.com
,
www.facebook.com/XuXiWriter
, or
@xuxiwriter
.

Ashley Young
is a black queer feminist writer and poet working as an editor in New York City. She received her BA from Hampshire College, where she studied education and theater and is earning a certification in copyediting at New York University. She is a 2010 Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation Poetry Fellow and a 2011 Lambda Literary Foundation Creative Nonfiction Fellow. Her feminist poetry and prose have been published in
Elixher
magazine,
Rkvry Quarterly Literary Journal, Autostraddle, Her Circle
magazine, and more. She authored a chapter in
Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love & Fashion
(2012) and is working on her first novel, an Audre Lorde–inspired biomythography.