Mecca Jamilah Sullivan Books

Black queer feminist poetics : rereading the intersection -- Biomythic times : voice, genre, and the invention of Black/queer history -- "Walkin on the edges of the galaxy" : queer choreopoetic thought in the African diaspora -- Feeling colors and seeing speech : body/language and Black women's diasporas of difference -- "Languages of love," "TALK" of Sex : interstitial idioms of body and desire -- Speech between silence : distance, difference, and the queer poetics of Black woman living

In her highly anticipated debut novel, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan explores the perils―and undeniable beauty―of insatiable longing.Growing up in a rapidly changing Harlem, eight-year-old Malaya hates when her mother drags her to Weight Watchers meetings; she’d rather paint alone in her bedroom or enjoy forbidden street foods with her father. For Malaya, the pressures of her predominantly white Upper East Side prep school are relentless, as are the expectations passed down from her painfully proper mother and sharp-tongued grandmother. As she comes of age in the 1990s, she finds solace in the music of Biggie Smalls and Aaliyah, but her weight continues to climb―until a family tragedy forces her to face the source of her hunger, ultimately shattering her inherited stigmas surrounding women’s bodies, and embracing her own desire. Written with vibrant lyricism shot through with tenderness, Big Girl announces Sullivan as an urgent and vital voice in contemporary fiction.