WRITING SISTERS SUMMIT

In additional to several industrial design patents, Nina has authored over 22 published works of fiction, as well as four non-fiction books, award-winning films, and several plays (including the accompanying music). Her work has appeared on numerous best-seller lists around the country and tackle such subjects as young adult internet safety, women’s issues and date rape in fictional backdrops. Her stories reflect a sense of place and culture and build on her experience as a psychologist and coach. Travel fuels her creativity. In addition to being a writer, Nina is an Applied Social Scientist and works a day job as a User Experience Research Leader at a multinational machine learning and artificial intelligence company. She has been an NAACP Image award nominee for Literary Excellence, short-listed for A Doctorow Award in Innovative Fiction and has won several African American Literary Awards. Nina hosts a podcast called Grown Ass Women with Nina Foxx which can be heard on most podcasting platforms. Along with her husband, Barry, she founded the Writing Sisters Summit, a wellness and writing retreat, held yearly, and Unapologetic: The Retreat, a creativity and journaling retreat for Black women. Nina is a psychologist and also holds an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University and is a RYT-500Hr with the Yoga Alliance and The Black Yoga Teachers’ Alliance. She is also in the process of completing her certification as a coach with the prestigious Hudson Institute of Coaching.

Nina splits her time between Seattle, WA and Playa Del Carmen, Mx.

Deesha Philyaw is the author of the debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (West Virginia University Press, 2020), which won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and a 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; the collection was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Her next two books, including her highly anticipated debut novel The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman (Mariner Books, 2024), and her second collection Girl, Look, a “poignant new collection, giving a vivid snapshot of the interior lives of Black women across generations, drawing readers to consider Black women and girls’ vulnerabilities, invisibility, and beautiful contradictions, in a post-COVID, post-Breonna Taylor world.”

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where Black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. Nine stories featuring four generations of characters who grapple with who they want to be in the world, the collection was praised as “luminous stories populated by deeply moving and multifaceted characters,” by Kirkus Reviews and “addictive while also laying bare the depth and vulnerability of Black women,” by Observer. Author Tara Campbell notes, “The love in Philyaw’s stories runs the gamut from sweet to bitter, sexy to sisterly, temporary to time tested, often with hidden aspects. The word secret in the title is earned, and some of the secrets are downright juicy.” The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is being developed for television by Tessa Thompson for HBO Max.

Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow. She currently lives in Oakland, CA.

Marita Golden is the co-founder of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, which presents programs that support the international community of Black writers and annually presents the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award to Black published writers of fiction, nonfiction and poetry as well as an annual award to college writers. She is the award-winning author of 17 works of fiction and nonfiction.

Migrations of the Heart, like many of Marita Golden’s books has been used in a wide variety of courses at universities and has been a book-club favorite. Among her novels, Long Distance Life was listed on the Washington Post Best-seller list and her most recent novel, The Wide Circumference of Love was named as a Best Book of the Year by National Public Radio and has been optioned for production as a tv or streaming series. Her anthology Gumbo, an Anthology of African American Writing edited with the late E. Lynn Harris was named an Honor Book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. With Susan Shreve she edited Skin Deep Black and White Women on Race. Her most recent book is the anthology Us Against Alzheimer’s Stories of Family, Love and Faith.

Marita has served on the Graduate Creative Writing faculties of George Mason University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Johns Hopkins University and served as a Visiting Writer at many schools including Brandeis University and Vanderbilt University. Internationally, Marita Golden has served as a resident writer in Turkey, Spain and Israel.

Ms. Golden offers writing workshops and seminars which bring together writers from all over the country. She has taught, mentored, coached, worked as co-editor or development consultant with many prominent award-winning writers including political analyst Donna Brazile, (Cooking With Grease Stirring the Pots in America) novelists Nicole Dennis-Benn, (Here Comes the Sun and Patsy) Tope Folarin, (A Particular Kind of Black Man) Tracy McGhee, Melting the Blues) Sadeqa Johnson, (Second House From the Corner) the short story writer Camille Acker, (Training School for Negro Girls) and Karen Gray Houston author of the memoir Daughter of the Boycott Carrying on a Montgomery Family’s Civil Rights Legacy and Nita Wiggins author of Civil Rights Baby Race, Sports Breaking Barriers in American Journalism by Nita Wiggins.