Mecca is a fiction writer and scholar born and raised in Harlem, New York. She is the author of three books: the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love (2015), winner of the Judith Markowitz Award for Fiction from Lambda Literary; a scholarly book, The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora (2021), a New Black Studies Series selection from University of Illinois Press; and the novel Big Girl (W.W. Norton/ Liveright 2022). Mecca holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University, and a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College. In her fiction, she explores the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young Black women through voice, music, and hip-hop inflected magical realist techniques. Her short stories have appeared in Best New Writing, Kenyon Review, American Fiction: Best New Stories, TriQuarterly, Feminist Studies, All About Skin: Short Stories by Award-Winning Women Writers of Color, and others. Her fiction has earned the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, the Glenna Luschei Fiction Award, the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, the 2021 Pride Index National Arts and Culture award, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, Lambda Literary, the Publishing Triangle, and the Center for Fiction in New York City, where she received an inaugural Emerging Writers Fellowship in 2011.
Sullivan’s scholarly writing explores the connections between sexuality, identity, and creative practice in contemporary African Diaspora literatures and cultures, with a focus on Black queer and feminist literature. Her academic and critical writing has been published in Feminist Studies, American Literary History, Black Futures, Teaching Black, American Quarterly, College Literature, Oxford African American Resource Center, Palimpsest: Journal of Women, Gender and the Black International, The Scholar and Feminist, Women’s Studies, The Rumpus, BET.com, Ebony.com, TheRoot.com, Ms. Magazine online, The Feminist Wire, New York Magazine’s The Cut, and many others. My scholarly research in Black feminist, queer, and Women of Color Feminist literature has earned support from the Mellon-Mays Foundation, the Social Sciences Research Council, Williams College, Rutgers University, Duke University, the American Academy of University Women, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation).
She is currently Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses in African American poetry and poetics, Black queer and feminist literatures, and creative writing.