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‘Another door that’s opened’: The Future of Creative Writing in the Age of Technology in UEA Live’s ‘Future and Form’

Written exclusively for UEA Live, by UEA LDC student Katy Mack

Posted on 28 April 2021

The arrival of spring and the clocks changing typically announce a time of year when our thoughts turn to the question of what lies ahead. But this year you would be forgiven for feeling that the future is a slightly murky concept. The future has become increasingly difficult to grasp ­­ — there is a collective sense that our futures are looming large over our heads, sitting at some far-off point in the distance , with our present so strangely stationary. Yet in this present, certain truths have come to light. Both the use of technology and the sale of physical books — once thought to be relegated to the realm of the kindle — have soared. Which is why, from this peculiar and turbulent vantage point we all find ourselves in, ‘Future and Form’ resonates with the current suspension in which we live. Semi-frozen in the present, looking to the past, with a future both unknown and nearly-tangible — sat just beyond on our reach.

The project, supported by Arts Council England, part of UEA Live’s celebration of 50 years of its Creative Writing programme, looks ahead to the next 50 years and asks what the future has in store for literature in the digital age. In response to this question, 6 writers: Ayòbámi Adébáyò, Mona Arshi, Tash Aw, Imogen Hermes Gowar, Mitch Johnson, and James McDermott—all UEA Creative Writing alumni—have been tasked with the challenge to create a series of innovative and interactive works which explore the interface between writing and technology. Each writer has been paired up with creative digital technologists, members of the UEA faculty, as well as cultural and educational organisations across East Anglia, including Norwich Theatre, Norfolk Wildlife Trust and the National Centre for Writing. While most of these projects are still in process—the hope being that many of them will be showcased as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival in May—this event was a teaser, giving audiences a sense of how the finished products might look, and sound, in the forthcoming months.

‘Provenance’: Ayòbámi Adébáyò and Mutiny. Photo © Jean McNeil

In considering the prospect of the future, it is striking that many of the writers in ‘Future and Form’ have also turned their focus back into the past. As if the act of looking forwards is inextricably bound up with the urge to look backwards. The projects described by novelists Ayòbámi Adébáyò and Imogen Hermes Gowar are both preoccupied with this backward glance. Adébáyò’s work ‘Provenance’ centres around a sacred object, known as Ibeji amongst the Yoruba of southwest Nigeria. Her piece provides an alternative provenance for the object, challenging what audiences might typically see detailed on a museum caption. This work follows the more intimate story of a family’s history, moving from Nigeria in the 1800s to present-day Norwich. Each section of the work will be narrated on a triptych of screens, with an actor present too. The overarching story of history, Adébáyò’s work seems to intriguingly imply, is punctuated with gaps. History is as much about the stories it neglects to tell as those it does. Her work seeks to expose these counter-narratives, which have been pushed down beneath the surface.

‘Eleanor’: Imogen Hermes Gowar and Mutiny

In Gowar’s offering, too, the past bubbles up through the surface of the present day. ‘Eleanor’, written in collaboration with the Norwich Castle Museum, is a story which has been exhumed from the very bones of the body of Lady Eleanor Talbot. The project is, in part, a response to the human remains recently acquired by the museum and believed to be those of Lady Talbot — whose story history has overlooked. She was the daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury and was alleged to have had a secret marriage to King Edward IV. If this had been the case, then our understanding of the course of history would be dramatically shaken. This question — who this forgotten woman was —   is central to Gower’s project. Audiences will be invited to follow a guided immersive journey around Norwich, played through a mobile device, which incorporates elements of audio and sound where Eleanor tells different versions of her story. In both Gowar’s and Adébáyò’s works, digital technology has been harnessed to resurrect these fictionalised narratives. It has enabled each writer to present the multiple and various ‘fighting truths’, as Gowar puts it, of these buried and neglected lives. Such multiplicity would be difficult to recreate on the page, and Gowar talks engagingly about how the process has illuminated the restriction of the writer’s codex notebook. Both of these works speak with a haunting beauty to the strange multiplicity of the present moment. The way in which the future sits alongside the past and the present, all seeming to co-exist simultaneously within the same four walls which so many of us have been confined to.

‘The Living Book’: Mitch Johnson and Guildhall Live Events

Yet alongside the innovation and promise of these works, there is also a palpable anxiety surrounding the future. In children’s author Mitch Johnson’s youth-focused piece ‘The Living Book’, school children were asked to envisage what the world might look like in the future. They were given two choices: to look forward to the future as an age of great potential and green regeneration, or — in a slightly more foreboding vein — as a time of ruin and destruction at the hands of climate change. While the idea of our futures signposted between the path of hope and that of despair may appear stark, even bleak, to some, this starkness is nonetheless entirely appropriate to the discussions we are currently having as to what a post-Covid world might look like.

‘Senseless’: James McDermott and Guildhall Live Events

Similarly, poet and playwright James McDermott’s play ‘Senseless’ explores the frightening prospect of a global emergency which, in an eerie twist of fate, seems to echo our current circumstances. The play imagines a world where a digital virus has taken hold, stopping people from being able to communicate or express themselves. The challenge this project poses to the playwright is not lost on McDermott. He speaks of the difficultly of writing a play for the digital sphere, set in an imagined age where people cannot be in contact, and yet also performed in the midst of a time where audiences are not physically able to come together in the space of the theatre — one can’t help but wonder how these competing strands play out in the final piece.

‘Shifting Lines’: Mona Arshi and Mutiny

The precarious nature of the future, then, is an issue which comes up again and again in these works. This is particularly the case in poet Mona Arshi’s work ‘Shifting Lines’. Her project is situated in the landscape of the wildlife sanctuary at Cley in North Norfolk. Arshi speaks of this transforming and eroding scenery as having a ‘fragility’, yet this fragility is also counterbalanced by the resilience of the species which have survived there. The encounter between the fragile and the resilient seems to have also been absorbed into the interplay between the lyric poem—also described by Arshi as ‘fragile’—and the technology used to capture the sounds of the landscape. Arshi speaks of being alert to the potential ways in which the poem sits within and alongside the technical aspects of the project, without subsequently being overwhelmed by it. The result is a series of soundscapes which explore the delicate balance of these relationships. We were given a preview of this installation, the audience are able to hear fragments of Arshi’s poems read over a series of sounds which, to my ear, shifted between the sounds of the natural world — footsteps across shingle, water bubbling, and those of the artificial — the crackling of an old TV set. Part of the piece’s power came from the way in which these natural and artificial sounds complemented and, at times, jarred with the poems. The poems themselves are artfully poised within these conflicting tensions, adapting and changing in a ‘creaturely’ manner, as Arshi articulated it, in the space between.

Ultimately, many of these works seemed to muse on what it means to be human, in a natural and digital world which is rapidly changing, expanding, and eroding. This idea of change provided the closing note in the evening’s proceedings. Change is on the horizon for all of us and change — for these writers — means adaption. While technology, unquestionably, provides exciting freedoms and innovations for all the writers on the panel — another tool in the writer’s armoury, there is also something of enduring importance, as McDermott reminds us, about sitting in a dark theatre amongst strangers, with our phones switched off.

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Futures for Creative Writing

Online conference

Celebrating 50 years of Creative Writing at UEA, in partnership with the European Association of Creative Writing (EACWP).

Friday 21 may and saturday 22 may | online .

This online conference brought together PhD research students, Creative Writing tutors and graduates, writers and scholars to explore the varieties of practice in our discipline now, the points of convergence and contention, and, crucially, the opportunities for future development and the forces that may shape the nature of writing in the academy over the next several years.

Central to the conference was an acknowledgement of the importance of literature and drama in helping us navigate challenging moments in history.

Please contact [email protected]  for more information.

Keynote Speakers and special events

Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo, MBE and OBE, won the Booker Prize 2019 with her eighth book, Girl, Woman, Other, the first Black woman and Black British person to win it. The novel won many other prizes and was on the bestseller list for 44 weeks, including five weeks at #1. Her other novels are Mr Loverman, Hello Mum, Blonde Roots, Soul Tourists, Lara and The Emperor’s Babe. A literary activist, she has initiated many arts’ inclusion projects including the Brunel International African Poetry Prize and The Complete Works poetry-mentoring scheme. She is currently curating ‘Black Britain: Writing Back’, a new series with Hamish Hamilton at Penguin whereby Black British books are brought back into print and wider circulation. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London, a lifetime Honorary Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford, a lifetime Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature, and the new President of Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance. Read more: www.bevaristo.com Image credit: TBC

Carolyn Forché

Carolyn Forché is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent In the Lateness of the World (Bloodaxe Books, 2020), and a memoir, What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin UK, 2020), a finalist for the National Book Award in the U.S. and the James Tait Black Prize in the UK. She is a visiting member of the faculty of Newcastle University, and a University Professor at Georgetown University.

John Yorke is Managing Director of Angel Station where he works as a drama producer, consultant and lecturer on all forms of storytelling. A former MD of Company Pictures where he Exec Produced Wolf Hall, he’s worked as both Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production. As a commissioning Editor/Executive Producer, he championed huge British hits such as Life On Mars, The Street, Shameless and Bodies and in 2005 he created the BBC Writers Academy, a year-long in-depth training scheme which has produced a generation of successful television writers – many who have gone on to have their own shows. The author of Into The Woods – the biggest selling screenwriting book in the UK for the last six years, about how and why we tell stories - John is a double BAFTA winner (as programme maker) and multi BAFTA winner (as commissioner). He is also Visiting Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He lives in London but works as a story consultant worldwide.

Andrew Cowan

Andrew Cowan, is a novelist and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and has taught creative writing all over the world. His first novel Pig was published in 1994 and won a Betty Trask Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, The Authors' Club First Novel Award, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for five other awards. Common Ground (1996) and Crustaceans (2000) both received Arts Council bursaries. What I Know was the recipient of an Arts Council Writers' Award and was published in 2005. His creative writing guidebook The Art of Writing Fiction was published in 2011 and his fifth novel Worthless Men in 2013. His latest novel Your Fault was published by Salt in May 2019. He is currently writing a monograph, Against Creative Writing. Image credit: Martin Figura

A Journey around Our Rooms

The University of Kent hosts an interactive, online space for writers to share the spaces in which they write.

Contributors are invited to describe the room in which they work — which may include the spaces of imagination, memory, and association it opens on to. All forms are welcome, and submission of an accompanying image is encouraged. These texts will be published on a University of Kent-hosted webpage , as the beginning of an ongoing collaborative project.

In 1790, Xavier de Maistre, confined indoors under house arrest, embarked upon A Journey Around my Room. In this playful, picaresque, entirely unpredictable text, he examines his immediate environment and its contents — which are subject to fluctuations in dimension and bearing as his mood and attention changes — and he ventures out beyond its walls into the territories of speculation, memory, and daydream.

He wrote: ‘I am sure that any sensible man [or person] will adopt my system, whatever kind of character he may have, and whatever his temperament; whether he be stingy or prodigal, rich or poor, whether he was born in a torrid zone or near the Pole, he can travel just as I do; finally, in the immense family of men who swarm over the surface of the world, there isn’t a single one — no, not one (I mean of those who live in rooms) who will, after having read this book, be disinclined to endorse the new way of travelling that I am introducing into the world.’ (pp. 3-4)

This project is an invitation to take de Maistre up on his proposal.

We are, as writers, accustomed to movement, this venturing out from the space in which we work to the spaces of imagination. Yet in recent months many of us have become accustomed to a way of being, working, and writing that is more than usually restricted to that space. Rather than Virginia Woolf’s celebrated room of one’s own, many of our ‘rooms’ may be imperfect, multi-use, intruded upon, isolating, private or not private, productively shared, compromised or liberating.

For over a year now, we have been sitting in our rooms and joined a virtual space that connects those spaces together; we are used now to these thumbnail glimpses of each other’s lives and the rooms in which they are lived. We have learned that we can speak across time zones, connect across continents, each in our own room. It is likely that our experiences during the pandemic will alter our ways of working and being together indefinitely — now we know that this shared and separate space exists. Visit, https://research.kent.ac.uk/journey-around-our-rooms/ for more information, to see the pieces submitted so far and learn how you can submit a piece yourself.

The website, hosted by the University of Kent’s Centre for Creative Writing and Institute of Cultural and Creative Industries, will offer a way to remember and create enduring, ongoing insights and connections.

Amy Sackville and colleagues from the University of Kent ran a series of events and workshops across the conference weekend. Please refer to the online programme for full details.

School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing

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New Writing

#newwriting.

… is a collaboration between UEA Publishing Project and the School of Literature, Drama & Creative Writing , home of the world-renowned UEA Creative Writing MA. It showcases new writing from UEA (students, faculty and alumni) along with commissioned work from national and international literature projects.

It began as a research project into the potential of online editorial and writing collaboration, funded by  The Arts and Humanities Research Council  (Knowledge Catalyst scheme) and National Centre for Writing, with the support of UEA Faculty of Arts and Humanities  and the Malcolm Bradbury Memorial Trust .

It now sits under the UEA Publishing Project umbrella with ongoing support from UEA and the  British Centre for Literary Translation.  We will publish new fiction, poetry, creative non fiction, work in translation and critical writing all year round.

Press : For all general press enquiries, please contact publishing[at]uea.ac.uk.

Just Scapes

Our UK team

Back to ' Who we are '

Adrian Martin

Adrian is a social scientist who specialises in interdisciplinary research into environmental justice, with a particular focus on the governance of conservation in the global South and in Europe. Currently he's exploring the concept of ‘just transformations’ to sustainability, looking theoretically and empirically at how environmental justice can be an effective vehicle for integrating social and ecological visions. He's based at UEA, in the Department for International Development.

David Brown

A researcher specialising in environmental and climate justice, particularly on issues arising from climate change mitigation policies and practices. In his role as senior research associate on the ‘Just Scapes’ project, David is exploring perceptions of (in)justices related to climate-influenced rural land-use change, specifically focusing on an area in the Cairngorms, Scotland, through conducting literature reviews, in-depth interviews and other fieldwork.

Jean McNeil

Jean McNeil is an award-winning author of 14 books. At UEA she directs the Creative Writing programme and co-ordinates international activities. She has been writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey and has written extensively on the environment, nature and climate change. For Just Scapes she will be leading the community creative writing workshops that are a key innovative part of our research approach into landscapes past and future.

Kate looks after communications for Just Scapes. She's based at UEA, but works across the project as a whole. If you have a question, she's your first point of call .

Clare Connors

• Associate Professor , School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
• Member , Modern and Contemporary Writing Research Group

1.07 Arts and Humanities Building

Personal profile

Clare Connors is interested in literature, deconstruction and creative criticism - and in the interrelations between these. She is the author of Force from Nietzsche to Derrida (Legenda, 2010) and Literary Theory: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2010) and the co-editor, with Dr. Stephen Benson, of Creative Criticism: An Anthology and Guide ( EUP, 2014).  She is interested in the kinds of thinking literature performs, and permits, and in the kinds of critical writing such fictive thinking solicits. On all of these subjects she finds the work of Jacques Derrida the most extraordinary resource (along with that of Freud, Heidegger, Cixous, Ranciere and Sedgwick, amongst others). She has written essays on rhythm, on rhyme and on grace, and on Elizabeth Bowen, J. M. Coetzee and Ali Smith.

Administrative Posts

Clare is currently Associate Dean for Admissions for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

Areas of Expertise

Derrida and deconstruction.

Creative-critical writing

Fiction (especially contemporary fiction, but the novel more generally).

Research output

• 2 Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Research output per year

'Out of interest': Klara and the Sun and the interests of fiction

Research output : Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Most Interesting: Derrida and the Interest(s) of Literature

Creative criticism: a histori-manifesto.

Research output : Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter (peer-reviewed) › peer-review

Traces of grace in contemporary fiction: Ali Smith’s 'There but for the…'

Without grace (a working title).

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Crafting Crime Fiction

A practical, critical and personal guide to the craft of crime writing by novelist and creative writing professor, Henry Sutton. Drawing on exceptional experience and resource, the mystery of creating crime fiction which moves with pace and purpose, menace and motivation, is forensically and engagingly uncovered. The work of the genre’s greatest contributors, and that from many lesser known names from around the world, past and present, is explored with both practical acumen. Sutton also mines his own fiction for lessons learnt, and rules broken. Personal creative successes, struggles and surprises are candidly addressed. In nine entertaining chapters the key building blocks for crafting pertinent and characterful crime fiction, are illustrated and explained. The genre’s extraordinary dynamism, with its myriad and ever-evolving sub-genres, from the cosy to the most chilling noir, the police procedural to the geo-political thriller, is knowingly captured. However, the individual and originality are given centre stage, while audience and inclusivity continually considered and championed. This is an essential guide for those interested in writing crime fiction that gets noticed and moves with the times, if not ahead of the times.

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‘It was like we were garbage’: Stanford to ‘cycle out’ creative writing lecturers

One creative writing lecturer requested anonymity due to fears of professional retaliation. Pseudonyms and gender neutral pronouns were used to protect sources’ identities and improve readability.

Many of Stanford’s creative writing lecturers will be phased out over the next two years, as the University restores the Jones Lectureship’s term limit as part of the restructuring of the Creative Writing Program.

The restructuring, executed under the recommendation of a working group formed after the lecturers secured pay raises last September, was announced in a Zoom meeting on Wednesday, Aug. 21 by Humanities and Sciences dean Debra Satz, Humanities and Arts senior associate dean Gabriella Safran and Creative Writing Program co-director Nicholas Jenkins. The working group was composed of creative writing faculty members but no Jones Lecturers. 

The Jones Lectureship came with a four-year cap that only began to be enforced on fellows hired after 2019, but over the course of the years, some lecturers have stayed longer than the terms of the program. With the restoration of the original term-limited appointments, however, all current Jones Lecturers — including those hired prior to 2019 — will be let go within the next two years.

Some lecturers have already been affected; for instance, Rose Whitmore was dismissed in 2023 after winning that year’s Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize.

For Casey, a lecturer who requested the use of a pseudonym due to fear of professional retaliation, the Wednesday meeting felt cold and awkward.

“It was like we were garbage,” Casey said. “They didn’t even acknowledge how difficult this news would be, and when they did give us time to ask questions, the way they fielded the questions, particularly [Jenkins], it was just very cold and very dismissive.”

Safran disagreed with Casey’s characterization in a statement on behalf of the Creative Writing Program and the School of Humanities and Sciences. The Daily also reached out to the University for comment but has not obtained a response.

During the Wednesday meeting, the deans told the lecturers that they would be “cycled out.” They clarified that it meant the lecturers’ jobs would be “terminated,” Jones Lecturer Tom Kealey told The Daily. Some lecturers will be teaching for an additional year, while others will be teaching for two more years. Kealey called the situation a “future fire.” 

“We were brought in to discuss the ‘restructuring’ of the overall program, and then we were all fired,” Kealey said. One lecturer even told him the meeting felt like the Red Wedding from Game of Thrones. 

Five minutes after the meeting, an email from Christina Ablaza, the administrative director of the Creative Writing Program, informed the lecturers that they could sign up for one-on-one meetings to discuss their individual situations. 

Lecturers to be affected by the decision were frustrated that they had no say in the phase-out. But Satz and Safran do not have voting power in the working group either — only the faculty members do. The faculty members made the decision “to fire all 23 of their junior colleagues” in what Kealey called a “secret meeting.” 

“I got the impression that the deans themselves were confused as to why the professors had voted to fire them,” Kealey said.

Kealey believed that 10 out of all the creative writing faculty members on the working group only taught 13 undergraduate classes last year, while the same number of Jones Lecturers would have taught 50 classes. Lecturers also advise about 90% of students in the Creative Writing Program and 50% of students in Department of English, he estimated.

Many students expressed concerns that they will lose a strong community of creative writing peers and classes. They are also confused as to what the program will look like in the future. 

Students are receiving information from each other, lecturers, a recently created Instagram page called “ripstanfordcw” (which stands for rest in peace, Stanford creative writing) and even from Fizz, an anonymous social media platform. The confusion comes a week before course enrollment is set to begin on Sept. 5.

Students have tried to voice their displeasure with the current decision. A petition , started by Kyle Wang ’22 M.A. ‘23, has received over 600 signatures from students and alumni. He began the petition after talking to some of his friends about the positive impact many of the Jones Lecturers have had on their lives. Other community membes tried to write emails to University administrators.

In an online announcement published on Wednesday, Aug. 28, the Creative Writing Program states that Stanford will increase “the number of creative writing classes to better meet high student demand as well as ensuring competitive compensation for both the lecturers and fellows.” According to the statement, more details will be released in the fall. 

“I know they said that they were having meetings and they’re reworking [the program], but it’s not very transparent,” said English major Skya Theobald ’25.

Mia Grace Davis ’27, a prospective English major, wanted to take “English 190E: Novel Writing Intensive,” a class known for its popularity and limited enrollment, in the fall. Now she is not even sure if it will be offered in the future. 

For Davis, the main appeal of Stanford had always been its Creative Writing Program, but “it’s kind of falling apart as we’re watching it,” she said.

To students who have taken numerous creative writing classes like Theobald, it doesn’t make sense why lecturers are being cycled out when the program wants to meet the growing demand for creative writing. 

Prospective English major Annabelle Wang ’27 said what’s happening has even made her reconsider her course of study.

“It definitely makes the English major less desirable,” she said of the phase-out. “I think for students and the student experience, it’s going to be a really big loss. A lot of community is going to be lost.”

Theobald also expressed concerns the variety of creative writing classes will be reduced. A lot of them such as “English 190G: The Graphic Novel” and “English 190E: Novel Writing Intensive” are rarely offered at other universities, but incoming freshmen now may not have the same opportunities to explore those classes. For instance, specialized classes like “The Graphic Novel” may not be offered again if the lecturers who teach them are let go, Kealey said.

Students felt that the Jones Lecturers have shaped the way they view their own writing. Lydia Wang ’27 had often struggled to understand the value of her writing, but her lecturers were the ones to help her realize there is a place in the world for what she creates. 

“That’s the type of impact that really changes people, and when people change, they can change the world as well,” she said. “So I really hope that Stanford learns to value the humanities, and especially creative writing, because we’re creating change, and we’re creating something for ourselves.” 

Some lecturers remain hopeful that the restructuring, which is ongoing, will be reconsidered.

“I may be naive, but I still believe in Stanford. I think Stanford is much better than this,” Kealey said. “I think as light is shed on this, enough people are going to say, ‘This doesn’t make our university better. It makes our university much worse.’”

Judy N. Liu '26 is the Academics desk editor for News and staff writer at The Daily.

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September 4, 2024

Ebony Lumumba Selected 2025 AWP HBCU Faculty Fellow

AWP named Ebony Lumumba, Ph.D., a 2025 HBCU Faculty Fellow for her contributions to Jackson State University's creative writing initiatives.

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) has announced Jackson State University’s Dr. Ebony Lumumba as one of its 2025 HBCU Faculty Fellows.

Lumumba is the chair of the Department of English and Modern Languages at Jackson State and an associate professor of English. According to the university, the educator’s dedication to the creative writing space and her efforts to introduce several literature-focused initiatives as part of the HBCU experience reflect the AWP HBCU Faculty Fellowship’s mission to support the work of faculty who strive to promote creative writing at their HBCUs.

Meet the #AWP25 HBCU fellows! Our faculty fellows are Ebony Lumumba, @bullcitybard & @braycrowell , and our student fellows are Kamryn Hughes, Corinne Fuller, @PoitierJohn , Veronica Holmes, Destini Rainer & Ja’Nya Henderson! Learn more about them today. https://t.co/XdQJynOUeK pic.twitter.com/gnDADQTHw9 — AWP (@awpwriter) July 9, 2024

According to AWP, 2,0 25 faculty fellows will receive a $4,000 honorarium, paid travel and lodging to participate in AWP’s Annual Conference & Bookfair in Los Angeles, access to private group discussions, a complimentary one-year AWP membership, and publication in the Writer’s Chronicle about the 2025 AWP experience.

“It’s a tremendous honor to have been selected,” said Lumumba, one of the creators of her department’s program at Jackson State, which offers a minor and concentration in creative writing. “Black writers and Black schools deserve this support and attention . Some of the most brilliant stories of our time were crafted by minds educated at HBCUs.” Support for the program has accumulated over $100,000 in donations in addition to a writer’s series she launched with colleagues that has introduced students to authors like Imani Perry, Ibram X. Kendi, Crystal Wilkinson, Jamila Minnicks, and Michelle Duster.

The college educator earned her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Mississippi after completing her Bachelor of Arts in English at Spelman College and a Master of Arts in English at Georgia State University.

This year, the HBCU alum is an official panelist for the Mississippi Book Festival scheduled for Sept. 14 . As a board advisor with the nonprofit, she is part of a group of literacy advocates reaching thousands of book lovers and authors during their annual festival in the South. She was honored by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and the Eudora Welty Foundation as the 2013 Eudora Welty Research Fellow before receiving Tougaloo College’s Humanities Teacher of the Year in 2014.

In March 2025, Lumumba and Jackson State’s Department of English and Modern Languages plans to host a screening of “Below the Belt” and a discussion with the filmmaker as part of the Film and Visual Culture Series she previously launched with a screening of “Emmett Till: White Lies Black Death,” which featured a discussion with filmmaker Loki Mulholland. Her advocacy for education and the arts has led to her board roles with the Foundation for Mississippi History, the Mississippi Humanities Council, The International Ballet Competition, and national advisory roles with the Eudora Welty Foundation and the Mississippi Museum of Art.

As the 2025 AWP HBCU Faculty Fellow, the professor is excited to work with and support the new wave of writers as they embark on their writing journeys and pursue the field.

• English professor
• jackson state university