Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi, Jenny Tinghui Zhang & Mecca Jamilah Sullivan: A Conversation

Jenny Tinghui Zhang is a Chinese American writer. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Apogee, Ninth Letter, Passages North, The Rumpus, The Cut, Catapult, on HuffPost, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming and has received support from Kundiman, Tin House, and VONA/Voices. She was born in Changchun, China, and grew up in Austin, Texas, where she currently lives. Set against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Zhang’s debut book Four Treasures of the Sky: A Novel (Flatiron Books) follows the story of Daiyu. She never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named – revered for her beauty and cursed with heartbreak. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, she must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself. Over the years that follow, she will reinvent herself to survive. She tries to outrun the tragedy that chases her, and we follow her from a calligraphy school and a San Francisco brothel to a shop in the Idaho mountains. As anti-Chinese sentiment sweeps across the country in a wave of unimaginable violence, Daiyu must draw on who she has been to claim her name and story.

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D., is the author of The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora and the short story collection Blue Talk and Love, and is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University. In Big Girl: A Novel (Liveright), we meet 8-year-old Malaya Clondon. She hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings; she’d much rather paint alone in her bedroom or sneak out with her father to sample Harlem’s forbidden street foods. The expectations of her sharp-tongued grandmother and her mother, Nyela, a painfully proper professor at a prestigious university, add to the pressures of going to a predominantly white Upper East Side prep school. And their prescriptions – fad diets of cottage cheese and sugar-free Jell-O, high-cardio African dance classes – don’t work on Malaya. Coming of age in a rapidly gentrifying 1990s Harlem, she strains to understand “ladyness” and fit in a version of femininity that holds no room for her body. She finds solace listening to Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah and in the support of her father. Tensions at home are rapidly mounting and nothing seems to help – until a family tragedy forces her to face the source of her hunger on her own terms.

Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria, and graduated from Barnard and UPenn with bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in computer science. Her stories and poetry have appeared in New Writing from Africa 2009, Ploughshares, The Massachusetts Review, the Indiana Review, Wasafiri, Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa, and The American Poetry Review. Moving between Nigeria and America, Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions: A Novel in Interlocking Stories (Amistad) is a linked short story collection that explores the world of four accomplished Nigerian women. Nonso, Remi, Aisha, and Solape are students at an all-girls boarding school. They forge an unbreakable sisterhood – tempered during a school rebellion with repercussions that will reverberate throughout their lives. As children of well-to-do families, these young women have been raised with a thirst for independence, believing a university education is their right. But then, they must grapple with adulthood and the world’s uncertainties within and outside Nigeria. Revolving around loss, belonging, family, friendship, alienation, and silence, Jollof Rice is a portrait of women contending with the unsettling notion that moving forward in time isn’t necessarily progress.