IPH Creative Commrades

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Raina Leon is a Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective.

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Dr. L. Teresa Church is a playwright and quilter and serves as Membership Chairperson for the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective.

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Chanell Harris, MFA, Poetry Editor of the Warpland Journal, has been published in the Louisiana English Journal(2005) and Fingernails Across the Chalkboard, Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora(2006).

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Elizabeth Zandile Tshele is full time college student who loves to write.

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Mama Nia is a 40 something Spirit, Woman, Mother, Daughter, Child, Black, survivor, Healer, Griot, working her universal plan as the Associate Director of SpiritHouse, and as a member of the UBUNTU collective.

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Ashaki Jackson is a social psychologist and poet who currently resides in California. Her manuscript, which mainstreams topics of Flamenco, cannibalism, and redemption, will be released in Spring 2008.

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Dosali Reed-Bandele is a 30 year-old, wife of a strong man, mother of three energetic children and passionate educator. She is the founder and director of Nile Valley Children’s School in Durham, North Carolina.  

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Marta M. Miranda is a poet and Tennessee resident.

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Mai is poet-- some parts of most days, who lives the inside the realm of live music. Thus, she aims to express the music of life experiences, most often, through the filter of musical themes.

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Derrick Weston Brown holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. In 2006 he released his first chapbook of poetry entitled The Unscene and is currently working on his second chapbook/manuscript tentatively entitled Watershed.

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Jurina Hill is a community worker and poet living in Durham, NC.

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Nina Angela Mercer was born and raised in Washington, D.C.  She is a playwright, fiction writer, visual artist and educator.  Nina graduated from Howard University in 1995 and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing-Fiction at American University in 2000.  Her play, “GUTTA BEAUTIFUL” has been staged at The Warehouse Theatre , The Woolly Mammoth Theatre, and Woodie King Jr.’s New Federal Theatre Company.  She currently resides in the Bronx, NYC with her daughters, Aya Imani and Raisa Selam. Visit  www.oceananarisinginc.org
and blog: www.windowsdoorsclosetsanddrawers.blogspot.com, for more information.

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Kim Arrington released her first volume of poetry, the lapis dwellers, in August 2005. Kim’s latest endeavor is a sophomore book of poetry, hurling towards ovation:  love words. For more information: www.kimarrington.com 

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Crystal White is Actress, Singer, writer, and Cook! She lives in Rome Italy for the past 25 years and enjoys traveling all over the world singing, observing, gathering stories and recipes.

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Walidah Imarisha is part of the poetry duo Good Sista/Bad Sista, the director of the post-Katrina documentary Finding Common Ground in New Orleans.  www.poetryoffthepage.com

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Fred Joiner is the Poet in Residence at Bus Boys and Poets.  He lives and works in DC.

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Kim Foote is a Chicago-based writer who strongly supports the empowerment of Africana women. “Forest Blood” is excerpted from a novel-in-progress inspired by a year spent in Ghana on a Fulbright research fellowship.

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Jaki Shelton Green is an arts activist, teacher, author: breath of the song, singing a tree into dance, Conjure Blues, Masks, Dead on Arrival, Dead Arrival and New Poems.  2007 Sam Ragan Award, 2003 NC Award in Literature.

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Kimberly S. Morris is an emerging poet from Jackson, Tennessee.

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Tamara Madison is a writer, poet, and performer currently living and working in Georgia.  She is the author and performer of  Naked Voice, the 2002 winner of the First Literary Recording Contest sponsored by AUTHENTIC VOICE work Records. 

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Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a poet and community worker.  She is completing a Ph.D. in African American Literature and Women’s Studies at Duke University.

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Yvette has acquired strength and wisdom through the abuse she has experienced, seen, and created. Her poetry reflects her soul; the things she was afraid to say, the things no one wants her to say.

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Alan King has been published in Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature & Ideas, Taboo Haiku, among others. He is the author of his self-published book "Transfer".

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Zachari J’lease measures time in palm-rolls and space with kite string.

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L. G. Pearl is a fiction writer.

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Ebony Noelle Golden is singing a purple glow with her whole body. www.bettysdaughterarts.synthasite.com, www.iamnotaproject.com

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Amaris Howard Is a poet and community worker, originally from Hampton, Virginia. 

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Asha Bandele is a poet and writer living in Brooklyn, NY.