About the Artists:

Sheree L. Greer is a text-based artist living in Tampa, Florida. In 2014, she founded Kitchen Table Literary Arts Center to showcase and support the work of Black women and women of color writers. She is the author of two novels, Let the Lover and A Return to Arms, and a short story collection, Once and Future Lovers. Her nonfiction essay “Bars,” published in Fourth Genre Magazine, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Michal "MJ" Jones is a poet & parent in Oakland, CA. Their work is featured or forthcoming at Anomaly, Kissing Dynamite, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review & TriQuarterly Review. They are an assistant poetry editor at Foglifter Press, and have received fellowships from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, VONA/Voices & Kearny Street Workshop. They are currently an MFA graduate fellow at Mills College.

Shayla Lawz is a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Jersey City, NJ. She works at the intersection of text, sound, and performance and has received fellowships from Jack Jones Literary Arts, Cave Canem, CAAPP, and The Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden. She lives in Brooklyn where she teaches in the department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. Her debut poetry collection titled speculation, n. was chosen by Ilya Kaminsky for the Autumn House Poetry Prize and will be published fall 2021.

Christian Loriel Lucas is a fiction writer, screenwriter, and essayist originally from Memphis, TN. She received her Master of Arts in English at the University of Louisville. She has published with Midnight and Indigo and recently wrote an article on author Toni Morrison for Searchable Sea Literature (Williams College and Mystic Seaport). Currently she is an adjunct professor of English composition at Simmons College of Kentucky. She lives with her husband and two children in Louisville.

Daniel B. Summerhill is Assistant Professor of Poetry/Social Action and Composition Studies at California State University Monterey Bay. He has performed in over 30 states, the UK, and was invited by the US Embassy to guest lecture and perform in South Africa. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Button Poetry, Flypaper, Cogs, The Hellebore and others. His collection Divine, Divine, Divine is available now from Oakland-based Nomadic Press.

Our Moderators:

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning author, editor, and poet. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science, and the genius of Mississippi Delta culture. Her first prose collection, Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books) was a finalist for the 2021 Ignyte, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards for the Year’s Best Collection. Her hybrid/multigenre collection Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press) was longlisted for the 2016 Otherwise Award and honored with a PW Starred Review, and Shotgun Lullabies (2011) is being adapted for a dance performance at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her Dark Matter anthologies won two World Fantasy Awards and she was nominated for the 2020 and 2021 World Fantasy Award for Year’s Best Collection and for her contributions to the field. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (1945-2010), The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror vol 2, The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction, the New York Times, The Ringing Ear, Ghostfishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, and Marvel's Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda. Sheree is the tenth editor of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, founded in 1949, and the associate editor of Obsidian, founded in 1975. A former New Yorker, she lives in her hometown, Memphis, Tennessee, near a mighty river and a pyramid. Visit www.shereereneethomas.com

Nandi Comer is the author of American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press) and Tapping Out (Northwestern University Press). She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a Callaloo Fellow, and a Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Muzzle, The Offing, and Southern Indiana Review. She directs the Allied Media Projects Speakers Bureau and is a founding member of the collective Detroit Lit.

#ObsidianVoices Fall 2021

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