Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D. is the author of the novel Big Girl (W.W. Norton & Co. 2022), a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and a best books pick from Time, Essence, Vulture, Ms., Goodreads, Library Reads, and SheReads.com. Her previous books are  The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, winner of the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015), winner of the Judith Markowitz Award for Fiction from Lambda Literary. Her writing has appeared in Best New Writing, Kenyon Review, American Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, The Cut, American Literary History, Black Futures, American Quarterly, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, Ebony, The Root, and others, and has earned honors from the Center for Fiction, the American Association of University Women, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her novel, Big Girl, was a Phenomenal Book Club pick and a WNYC 2022 Debut selection. Of the novel, author and activist Janet Mock observes: “Big Girl gifts us a heroine carrying the weight of worn-out ideas who dares to defy the compulsion to shrink, and in turn teaches us to pursue our fullest, most desirous selves without shame,” while author Kiese Laymon says: “There are three books on earth that I would give anything to be able to write and reread until the sun burns us up. Big Girl is one of those books […] a new American classic that we as a country and a culture desperately need.”

Mecca is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. Born and raised in Harlem, New York, she currently lives in Washington, DC.