Writer-in-Residence Archives

Nikki Giovanni
Inaugural Writer-in-Residence

It was during the Black Arts Movement that Nikki Giovanni came to the forefront as a poet whose unabashedly articulate and commanding yet graceful voice evoked powerful commentary on the history and the hope of people, especially Black people. As was noted in Ebony, “The work of Nikki Giovanni has been as evolutionary as it has been revolutionary. One of the finest poets our time … Giovanni is poetry in motion.” Her book, The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998, is a testament to her having produced a vast body of work which includes not only poetry anthologies but poetry recordings, nonfiction essays and children’s literature. Make Me Rain, published in 2020, is her most recent work.

Nikki Giovanni has received seven NAACP Image Awards. She is also the inaugural recipient of the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award and was awarded the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry. In short, Nikki Giovanni is a national treasure. As a Distinguished Professor of writing at Virginia Tech, she continues to invest in the development of future writers.

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Additional information regarding the events, dates, times and registration process will be provided at a future date on the University’s website. Dates, times and activities are subject to change.

Kevin Powell
Writer-in-Residence

Kevin Powell is one of the most celebrated political, cultural, literary, and hip-hop voices in America. A native of Jersey City, Powell was raised by a single mother in a community stricken with extreme poverty and violence. His life transformed after studying at Rutgers University in New Brunswick thanks to the New Jersey Educational Opportunity Fund, a program created during the Civil Rights Movement to benefit poor youth. Today, he has lectured, worked, and traveled in all 50 American states and five of the world’s seven continents.

Powell has become a highly regarded poet, journalist, and author of 15 books, including “When We Free The World,” his new short essay collection about freedom, justice, and equality in America. His other titles include: “In The Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers;” “recognize; Keepin’ It Real: Post-MTV Reflections On Race, Sex, and Politics;” “Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature;” “Who’s Gonna Take the Weight: Manhood, Race, and Power in America;” “No Sleep Till Brooklyn: New and Selected Poems;”; “Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, and The Ghost of Dr. King;” and his critically acclaimed autobiography, “The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey into Manhood,” which is being adapted for the screen. His newest poetry collection, “Grocery Shopping with My Mother,” will soon be published by Soft Skull/Penguin Random House.

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Additional information regarding the events, dates, times and registration process will be provided at a future date on the University’s website. Dates, times and activities are subject to change.

Attica Locke
Writer-in-Residence

Attica Locke is an acclaimed novelist and writer/producer for television and film. Her novel Bluebird, Bluebird won the Edgar Award for best novel, was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was named as a Best of 2017 book by the New York Times, Washington Post, and Financial Times. The sequel, Heaven, My Home, was published on September 17th, 2019. Her previous novel, Pleasantville, was the winner of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and was also long-listed for the Bailey’s Prize for Women’s Fiction. Her first novel, Black Water Rising, was nominated for an Edgar Award, an NAACP Image Award, as well as a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was short-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her second book, The Cutting Season, was a winner of the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.

A former fellow at the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmaker’s Lab, Locke has both written and produced for the screen. She was a writer and producer on the Netflix miniseries, When They See Us, directed by Ava Duvernay; Hulu’s limited series, Little Fires Everywhere; and the Fox drama Empire. She most recently developed and was the showrunner for limited series From Scratch on Netflix with Zoe Saldana starring, based off her sister, Tembi Locke’s, bestselling novel. She is developing several other television projects, as well as plotting the next two novels in the Highway 59 series. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

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Additional information regarding the events, dates, times and registration process will be provided at a future date on the University’s website. Dates, times and activities are subject to change.

photo credit Tyson Horne
Exclusive

Tayari Jones Writer-in-Residence

New York Times best-selling author Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, most recently An American Marriage. Published in 2018, An American Marriage is an Oprah’s Book Club Selection and also appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list as well as his year-end roundup. The novel was awarded the Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), Aspen Words Prize and an NAACP Image Award. It has been published in two dozen countries.

Jones, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow, was added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016.

Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.

“I don’t mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice. I would be doing this even if I wasn’t a writer. I grew up in a household that believed in social justice.  I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated.”

 —Tayari Jones

Over the course of her award-winning career, Tayari Jones’s novels and essays have explored the vagaries of birth and fate, the bitterness of injustice, and the persistent power of love. With her most recent novel, the instant New York Times bestseller An American Marriage, she “has emerged as one of the most important voices of her generation” (Essence).

In this “moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young African-American couple” (Barack Obama, on selecting the novel for his summer reading list), Jones introduces us to Celestial and Roy, a newlywed couple standing on the threshold of the American Dream. When Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, their lives implode. And when his conviction is overturned five years later, both must navigate the unimaginable fallout of their enforced estrangement.

“It’s among Tayari’s many gifts that she can touch us soul to soul with her words.”

 —Oprah Winfrey

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Daniel Black, Ph.D.Writer-in-Residence

Dr. Daniel Black is a 30-year professor of African American Studies at Clark Atlanta University. He is also an award-winning novelist, activist, mentor and public speaker. His published works include They Tell Me of A Home, The Sacred Place, Perfect Peace, Twelve Gates to the City, The Coming, Listen to the Lambs, Don’t Cry for Me, Black on Black, and Isaac’s Song. In 2014, he won the Distinguished Writer’s Award from the Mid-Atlantic Writer’s Association. The Go On Girl! National Book Club named him “Author of the Year” in 2011 for his best-selling novel Perfect Peace. Perfect Peace was also chosen as the 2014 selection for “If All Arkansas Read the Same Book” by the Arkansas Center for the Book at the Arkansas State Library. The novel has been reprinted more than ten times and is being heralded as an American literary classic. Dr. Black has been nominated (three times) for the Townsend Literary Prize, the Ernest J. Gaines Award, the Ferro-Grumbley Literary Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, he Georgia Author of the Year Prize, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.

In 2015, Dr. Black’s The Coming was published to broad critical acclaim. The novel is a first-hand account of the trauma and triumph of Africans aboard a slave ship in the 16^th century. Reviewers call this work “brilliant”, “poetic”, and “a literary homage to the lives of those Africans tossed into the sea.” National Book Award winner Charles Johnson says, “The Coming is powerful and brilliant.” He goes on to state, “This is a work to be proud of!” In 2016, Dr. Black’s long-awaited novel Listen to the Lambs was released. This novel explores the lives and agency of unhoused people who find each other on the street and create lives of meaning without material substance.

Dr. Black’s work has been justly celebrated. Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker says this about Perfect Peace: “It is a spellbinding novel that kept me reading late into several nights. A young boy raised as a girl until ‘she’ was eight years old…. and then? Forced to be a ‘boy.’ It is a gift to have so much passion, so much love, so much beautiful writing so flawlessly faithful to the language of ancestors who grappled as best they could with more than they could ever understand. This novel will one day be a film of much benefit to us, if done well. The visuals of it will help us see what we are so often blind to: the great fluidity inherent in all things, including ‘race’ and sexuality. Thank you, Daniel Black.”

Dr. Black’s newest novel, Don’t Cry For Me, was released by HarperCollins on February 1^st, 2022. About this novel, National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward says, “Don’t Cry for Me is a perfect song: the epistolary dirge of a man singing to his son as he faces death by cancer. At turns intense and funny, tender and brutally honest, Jacob’s letter to his son, Isaac, is revelatory. It’s a beautiful book. Read it.” Black’s newest work is his first essay collection titled BLACK ON BLACK, which was released on January 30^th, 2023. In response to this work, renowned Baldwin scholar Dr. Eddie Glaude says, “Black on Black is a tour de force. Brilliant. Passionate. Deeply caring. One reads these essays and feels immediately enveloped in Daniel Black’s love—even when he challenges you or when you might disagree. I really needed to read this book in these trying times.” Black also won the 2024 “Georgia Author of the Year Award” for Black on Black.

Dr. Black also works as a diversity consultant, having spoken at top-tier companies in America such as Google, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, AT&T, and Global Payments. He assists corporations with creating work environments in which all employees, of every level and difference, feel supported and valued.

A native of Kansas City, Kansas, Black spent his formative years in rural Blackwell, Arkansas. He graduated from Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University) where he earned the prestigious Oxford Modern British Studies fellowship and studied abroad at Oxford University. He was then awarded a full fellowship to Temple University where he studied with Black Arts Movement poet laureate Sonia Sanchez and, in 1992, earned a Ph.D. in African American Studies. Dr. Black has spent the majority of his 30 academic years as a professor of African American Studies at his beloved alma mater, Clark Atlanta University.

Dr. Black lives in Atlanta and is the founder of the Ndugu-Nzinga Rites of Passage Nation, an initiation society for people of African descent who seek to love themselves and build a world of character for their people.

In January of 2025, Dr. Black’s 8^th novel will drop, a literary sequel to Don’t Cry for Me, titled Isaac’s Song. His 9^th, Simon Says, is finished and forthcoming. He is currently at work on part II of The Coming titled The Second Coming and a black scripture titled The Good Book.

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