nicole shawan junior
A Haymarket Books Writing Freedom Fellow, Hedgebrook writer-in-residence, Tin House "Debut Author Over 40,” Lambda Literary “Emerging Queer Voice,” New York Foundation for the Arts Geri Ashur Screenwriting Fellow, and Narrative Initiative Changemaker Author, Nicole Shawan Junior is a creative force.
Meet junior
Nicole Shawan Junior is a creative nonfiction, literary horror, and fantasy writer. Junior’s writing is anthologized in Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing (Blair), The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting A Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket Books), and elsewhere. Guernica, the Rumpus, Oprah Daily, and others have published their essays. Their writing is Best of the Net-nominated and a Longreads Top 5 of the Week recipient. Junior is working on two book projects: a literary horror novel, Ire & the Girl, Slice, and a memoir, Cracked Concrete: A Memoir of Crackheads, Cousins, and Crime.
explore junior’s creative work
Junior’s prose and poetry appear in Oprah Daily, Teachers & Writers Magazine, Guernica, and elsewhere. Junior puts pen to paper to capture the journeys of around-the-block Black girls.
Junior is the former editor-in-chief of Black Femme Collective and has served on the editorial teams at Women's Studies Quarterly, SLICE Magazine, Raising Mothers, and others.
Junior hosts Of Monsters, a series of intimate conversations about the passageways, portals, and personal journeys traversed by speculative fiction masterminds and their characters.