Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is a fiction writer and playwright from Harlem, New York. Her fiction has appeared and is forthcoming in a number of journals and anthologies, including Crab Orchard Review, Best New Writing, Bloom, Philadelphia Stories, Lumina, Homeboy Review, Baby Remember My Name, X-24 Unclassified, Woman's Work, and Baobab South African Journal of New Writing, as well as literary publications from Columbia, Yale, Temple, and Howard Universities. Her nonfiction prose has also appeared in GLQ, American Visions, and other publications. A 2006 Best New American Voices nominee, she has received honors and awards for fiction, critical writing, playwriting, and teaching from Temple University, The Boston Fiction Festival, New World Theatre, the NAACP, and other organizations. She recently received Crab Orchard Review’s 2008 Charles Johnson Student Fiction Award for her short story, "A Strange People," and was named a finalist for the 2009 Downtown Urban Theatre Festival for her play, “Two Rings.” Her short fiction manuscript, Blue Talk and Love, was named a finalist for the 2009 Sol Books Prose series award, and her short story, “Wolfpack,” was a shortlist finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award from Best New Writing. Mecca has taken part in several writing workshops, including the Key West Literary Seminars, the Pan African Literary Forum in Accra, Ghana, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute, where she was awarded the Smith-Shonubi Scholarship in fiction. Mecca holds a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College and an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, and working on her first novel, tentatively titled She Woke Up With the Words in Her Mouth. Set in Harlem in the 1980’s and 1990’s the novel focuses on social class, body image, and self-care in contemporary American families.