Eisa Nefertari Ulen

Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of Crystelle Mourning (Atria), a novel described by The Washington Post as “a call for healing in the African American community from generations of hurt and neglect.” A Pulitzer Center grantee, she is the recipient of a Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center Fellowship for Young African American Fiction Writers, a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and a National Association of Black Journalists Award. Her essays exploring African American culture have been widely anthologized, most recently in Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect? (Haymarket), which won the Social Justice/Advocacy Award for 2017 from the School Library Journal's In the Margins Book Committee. Eisa has also contributed to ReadersDigest.com, TheHollywoodReporter.com, EssenceParents, The Washington Post, Ms., Health, Ebony, The Huffington Post, Pen.org, Los Angeles Review of Books, TheRoot.com, Truthout.org, TheDefendersOnline.com, TheGrio.com, and CreativeNonfiction.org. Eisa graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University. Awarded a Hunter College Presidential Award for Excellence for Teaching, Eisa teaches African and Diasporic literature for the Department of English and the Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies Department. She has also taught fiction writing at Baruch College and literature at The Pratt Institute. A founding member of Ringshout: A Place for Black Literature, she lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn.

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