Photograph of Kirsti Jewel, author of “I’ll Breathe For You,” published in this month’s issue in the Nonfiction section, and her husband, Kwame.
Join us for the first of three digital launch readings celebrating the release of the latest Kweli Journal issue from 7pm - 8pm, EST on Crowdcast. Register here.
Readings will be featured from:
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano (storyteller). She is pursuing her MFA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst where she teaches in the Writing Program. She has taught at Clarion West Writers Workshop online and earned her BA at Cornell University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Tin House Workshop and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She received the 2017 Cornell University George Harmon Coxe Award for Poetry selected by Sally Wen Mao and was the 2020 fiction winner of Columbia Journal’s Womxn History Month Special Issue. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Workshop for Black SFF writers. Her work has been anthologized in Tor.com and Fiyah Literary Magazine’s Breathe FIYAH anthology and the Voices of African Women Journal. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Columbia Journal, Tor.com, Fiyah Literary Magazine, Kweli Journal, the Jellyfish Review, and Kalahari Review.
Alicia Mosley (she/her) is a poet, fiction writer, mother, and community educator. She is a recipient of the Hurston Wright Foundation, Community of Writers, and the Gluck Arts Fellowships. Alicia’s creative work explores the magical labor of mothering while black and mothering black children. Her work honors the grief just as it celebrates the familial survival and perseverance in the ever-present threat of violence and anti-Blackness. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books, Sun Magazine, BLAC Zine, Pacific Review and An Anthology of Non-Conformism: Rebel Wom!n Words, Ways and Wonders. Alicia currently resides in Riverside, California and is working on her first novel, Mothering Pound.
Kirsti-Jewel is a former Bay Area school leader who recently accepted a role as the Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at an independent school in Manhattan. She is a 2020 Kweli Fellow and she enjoys writing nonfiction for both children and adults. Her writing centers Black love, Black joy and Black resistance, and she has a forthcoming children’s book about Juneteenth that will be released in 2022 with Penguin Random House. She currently lives in Biggie’s neighborhood in Brooklyn with her dog, Trini, and their favorite thing to do is to open up the windows and listen to the music their neighbors are playing.
Asha L. French is a writer from Louisville, KY who publishes across genres. She has published poems and essays in Pluck!, Warpland, Blackbone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets, Emory Magazine, Ebony, and the New York Times. Asha is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University, and her current project explores methods of emancipation in the writing of Toni Cade Bambara.
Lyndsey Ellis is a fiction writer, essayist, and author of Bone Broth (Hidden Timber Books, June 2021). She was a recipient of the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for her fiction. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Electric Literature, Joyland, Entropy, The Offing, Shondaland, and several anthologies. Ellis is a prose editor for great weather for MEDIA and The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose & Thought. She currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
