Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and an MFA
in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Her work has appeared in Story Quarterly,
Lunch Ticket, and The Feminist Wire, among other publications. She was a 2016 fellow of the
Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her first book, Heads of the Colored People, was long-
listed for the 2018 National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award, the PEN/Open
Book Award, and the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. She
also won a 2019 Whiting Award for fiction.
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