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Lesfic Authors of Color Directory
Biography
Domina Alexandra is a lesbian fiction author of stories with strong female protagonists, authentic emotions and thrilling action scenes that mirror her career as an EMT! From California and transplanted to Oregon!
Biography
Stephanie Andrea Allen, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at IU-Bloomington and her scholarship examines how Black lesbian literature and film responds to and resists the heteropatriarchal systems that contribute to the invisibility of Black lesbians in popular and literary culture. Her research interests include Black lesbian literary history, LGBTQ representation in the South, ethnography, Black feminism, sexual citizenship, lesbian print culture, writing communities, and popular culture.
Her current project “Marginal and Forbidden”: Black Lesbians, Contemporary American Culture, and the Politics of Representation, examines Black lesbian literature and film from 1972-2012 and argues that Black lesbian literature and other cultural artifacts mirror Black lesbians’ social, political, and cultural statuses, in that they are marginalized and often excluded from both Black and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities. She contends that Black lesbian cultural texts have two main goals: 1) to lay bare the experiences of Black lesbians in a raced, gendered, classed, and homophobic society; and 2) to challenge the notion that the claiming of a Black lesbian identity is “marginal and forbidden.”
Dr. Allen is also Founder, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief at BLF Press, and co-directs a literary non-profit for Black women writers. Her creative work can be found in Lez Talk: A Collection of Black Lesbian Short Fiction, Sinister Wisdom, and in her debut collection of short stories and essays, A Failure to Communicate. She co-edited Solace: Writing, Refuge, and LGBTQ Women of Color, and Black From the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Writing. She is a Hurston/Wright Foundation Workshop Alum, and 2019 Kimbilio Fellow (deferred). Stephanie is currently working on a collection of Black speculative short fiction and her first novel.
Biography
K. Ancrum, is the author of the award winning thriller THE WICKER KING, the brilliant lesbian romance THE WEIGHT OF THE STARS and the upcoming Peter Pan thriller DARLING. K. is a Chicago native passionate about diveristy and representation in young adult fiction. She currently writes most of her work in the lush gardens of the Chicago Art Institute.
Biography
Elizabeth Andre writes lesbian erotic romance, science fiction and young adult stories. She is a lesbian in an interracial same-sex marriage living in the Midwest. She hopes you enjoy her stories. She certainly loves writing them.
Biography
Zaina Arafat is an LGBTQ Arab/Muslim-American fiction and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the novel, You Exist Too Much, which was selected as a most anticipated book for 2020 by O, The Oprah Magazine, Good Morning America, Vogue, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, BuzzFeed, VICE, Guernica, Literary Hub and NPR. In recognition of her work, she was awarded the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts. She holds an M.A. in international affairs from Columbia University and an M.F.A. from Iowa. She lives in Brooklyn and is currently at work on a collection of essays.
Zaina has taught writing at the University of Iowa, The School of the New York Times, the International Writing Program and Sackett Street Writers, as well as abroad in Jordan, Egypt and Eritrea, where she taught creative writing as part of a U.S. State Department/International Writing Program delegation. She has also led workshops for dreamers and DACA recipients through the Writer’s Guild Initiative.
As an editor, she curated a portfolio of prose and poetry in response to the travel ban, as well as a Q & A series with Muslim writers for The Margins. She also served as the managing editor of VinePair, the largest online publication on wine news and culture.
Biography
Dolores Arden likes to think of herself as a writer deferred. She first discovered her love for the craft many moons ago while taking creative writing classes in college. But then throw in life and distractions and a demanding career in an unrelated field—and it’s taken her more than thirty years to come around to it again. She’s lucky to call the San Francisco Bay Area home, and these days she spends most of her time hiking the trails, digging holes in the garden, or being walked by a large and enthusiastic Great Dane named Remy. Gray Matters is her first novel.
Biography
Born in Puerto Rico, she and her family moved to New York when K was three. They landed in the middle of a blizzard, and K’s been complaining about the snow ever since.
At a compact four foot nine, K is a concentrated dose of geekery. She’s happy to ramble about everything from Gothic Literature to Revolutionary Girl Utena, with detours into Magic the Gathering and Star Wars. Her two best friend groups are her coven and her tabletop gaming group.
She is almost too queer to function.
She lives in Brooklyn with her skateboard hipster partner, their robot queen roommate, and a two foot tall statue of Wonder Woman.
You can find her on Twitter. She is represented by Sara Megibow of KT Literary.
Biography
Rachel E. Bailey was born and raised in New York City, and currently lives in New York State’s gorgeous Hudson Valley. Rachel has been a freelance everything, from copywriter to article writer. She’s also worked in various retail and office jobs that have tried to, but haven’t quite, sucked the soul out of her.
Rachel’s earned a bachelor’s of fine arts in advertising, with a focus on copywriting, and is in the process of earning a second bachelor’s in English, with a minor in creative writing. She’s been published in Words 57, The Finger, The Stonesthrow Review, on Yahoo!Voices, and Amative Magazine, Writing.com 2014 Anthology, the anthology My Favorite Apocalypse, and has had two short plays—The Big Opening and Messenger—performed for stage and screen, respectively. Her first novel, Dyre: By Moon’s Light, comes out in January of 2016.
Biography
Jennifer Dowdell, writing under the pseudonym Nikki Baker (born 1962), is an American mystery novelist. Her character Virginia Kelly is the first African-American detective to appear in lesbian fiction. Dowdell, who is herself African-American, received her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and took an MBA in economics and finance, and worked briefly as an engineer before turning to the financial services industry. Her mystery novels feature a young, black, lesbian financial analyst who lives and works in Chicago. She has also written two anthologized novellas. Baker’s work has been published by such outlets as Naiad Press, Bella Books, and Third Side Press.
Biography
LaSHONDA KATRICE BARNETT was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1974, and grew up in Park Forest, Illinois. She is the author of the award-wining debut novel JAM ON THE VINE (Grove 2015; paperback 2/2016) and a story collection (1999). Designated a Stonewall Honor Award by the American Library Association (2016), Jam was an Editor’s Choice pick at the Chicago Tribune; won ElIe Magazine‘s Belle Lettres 2015 Reader’s Prize and earned Barnett the Emerging Writers Award at the 2015 Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. The novel was shortlisted for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize and is a 2016 Lambda Literary Award finalist.
Barnett has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the College Language Association. She has held residences at the Noepe Center for Literary Arts-Martha’s Vineyard, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where she was a Tennessee Williams Fellow, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Her short fiction has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Guernica Magazine, Callaloo, New Orleans Review, SN Review, Juked, C4: Chamber Quarterly Literary Review, Gemini Magazine and elsewhere. She was twice-nominated for the 2015 Pushcart prize.
A lover and scholar of music of the African diaspora and an avid interviewer, Barnett has conducted over one hundred interviews with women musicians and edited the volumes, I GOT THUNDER: Black Women Songwriters On Their Craft (2007) and SOUNDING OFF: Conversations With African American and Brazilian Women Musicians (forth, University of North Texas Press). She has hosted her own jazz radio program on WBAI (99.5 FM, NYC); taught ‘Women in Jazz’ at New York City’s Jazz at Lincoln Center; and lectured on the music nationally and internationally. A graduate of the University of Missouri, Sarah Lawrence College and the College of William and Mary, where she received a B.A.; M.A. in Women’s History and the Ph.D. in American Studies, respectively. Barnett has held visiting professorships (in a range of academic disciplines, including African American Studies, history, literature and Women’s and Gender Studies) at Northwestern University; Brown University; Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American Studies; Sarah Lawrence College; and Hunter College. For the 2018/19 academic year, she was a visiting lecturer in the history department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Notes
LaShonda Katrice Barnett is an American author, radio host, teacher, lecturer. Her fiction, music books and plays are known for their themes about the African diaspora and race. She has a collection of short stories, three music books, a trilogy of full-length plays. Her 2015 debut novel Jam! On the Vine, drew attention to the author and scholar. In 2014, Barnett’s short stories were featured in The Chicago Tribune, Gemini Magazine and Guernica Magazine. She’s been nominated twice for the 2015 Pushcart Prize.
LaShonda Katrice Barnett was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1974. She grew up on Park Forest, Illinois. Barnett has identified herself as a lesbian and often writes with same-sex female characters in mind in her short stories, plays and her first novel Jam! On the Vine. She’s held residencies at the Noepe Center for Literary Arts-Martha’s Vineyard, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center. She’s been a Tennessee Williams Fellow and received a Standards Best Small Press Book Award for her short stories collection “Callalou & Other Lesbian Love Tales” in 2007.
Barnett has a love for music, as evidenced with her jazz program for WBAI (99.5 FM, NYC). She hosted a jazz show. In 2007, Barnett interviewed female musicians about the African diaspora and edited “I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters On Their Craft and “Off The Record: Conversations With African American & Brazilian Women Musicians” in 2015. Barnett lectured on women in jazz at the Lincoln Center and in on jazz as a whole in several countries.
Barnett taught at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College on history and literature.
Barnett received her B.A. from the University of Missouri, a M.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and a Ph. D. in American Studies from the College of William and Mary. She earned a B.A. in Women’s History from the University of Missouri and an M.A. in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College. Barnett received grants for her work from National Endowment for the Humanities, the New York Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the College Language Association.
Barnett lives in upper west side Manhattan as a full-time writer.