Nneoma Ike-Njoku (she/her) is a Nigerian writer, painter, and freelance editor living in Athens, Georgia. She grew up in Lagos, Mararaba, and Abuja, Nigeria, before moving to the United States in 2013 to pursue a degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. John’s College, where she studied French, Mathematics, and Laboratory Science on a Trustee scholarship. As an undergraduate, she was twice-awarded her college’s first-place prize for Best Original Writing for her short stories, and her flash fiction piece, “The Cylinder,” was selected for exhibition at the African Futures Lagos Festival with a grant from the Goethe-Institut and was also included in the African Futures anthology edited by Lien Heidenreich-Seleme and exhibited at the SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, Germany. She received her MFA in fiction from Cornell University in 2019, where she was awarded the James McConkey Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Award. She has most recently been awarded a 2021 pre-publication Betty Trask Award and is the winner of the 2022 DGA First Novel Prize for her novel manuscript-in-progress, The Water House, as well as a Miles Morland Foundation writing grant. This year, she was named a 2022/2023 MacDowell Fiction Fellow and a Kimbilio for Black Fiction Fellow for 2022. She is currently an English and Creative Writing Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia, where she received the Jane Appleby Entrance award. Her work has appeared in the African Futures anthology, Bat City Review, Transition, Winter Tangerine, NANO Fiction, and elsewhere.