WORDPLAY IN HER DNA
Nana’s creative journey has been flavored by the lingua franca of her life experiences: the colorful creoles of her communities she has called home – the pidgin English and franglais of West Africa, the street patois of neighborhoods from Brooklyn to Washington, D.C.; undergraduate years preparing herself for a career in international law by studying Mandarin and hanzi in Qingdao, scaling the Great Wall, and chuckling at signs in Chinglish. Ten years of adhering to the maxim primum est non nocere as a Licensed Practical Nurse, gave her an appreciation of the tenacity of the human spirit and strengthened her Latin lexicon. Likewise, in law school she learned terms like actus reus and ad infinitum as she worked on human rights projects to end trafficking of women and children in the Mekong Delta region.
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All these life events inform the stories she crafts. Her settings are enhanced with imagery from her travels to far-flung locales like the Angkor Wat temple ruins of Cambodia and the 2010 World Cup tournament host cities in South Africa. Her characters are enriched by the insights into human nature gained at patients’ bedsides or through briefing legal cases on matters like civil rights and gender equality, and a rewarding stint as Managing Editor of lifestyle magazine, The AFRican, solidified her dedication to uplifting diverse narratives from the continent.
When pried away from her keyboard sorcery, Nana interests are an eclectic, hi-low mashup like checking out Kara Walker’s sugar-mammy sphinx, “A Subtlety” installation one week then headbanging at Afropunk the next. Throughout her life hobbies have included years as an amateur painter and a flutist (she was a band geek who performed in the Cherry Blossom parade with a Nicheren Shoshu Buddhist marching band) to hand-crafting artist’s books at the Center for the Book. She generally loves travel, hunting rare finds in thrift shop bins, cultural jaunts to theaters/art houses/dance performances, all things geeky especially sci-fi flics - if it’s got an intergalactic spaceship or a spandexed superhero in it - she's there, and home decorating - her family teasingly calls her Martha, as in Stewart, (check out her interior design finesse here). She is currently kitting out her campus office in Jungalow-chic.
WALKING ON COWRIE SHELLS
Walking on Cowrie Shells is a “boisterous and high-spirited debut” (Kirkus starred review), named a Most Anticipated Book selection for Brittle Paper, The Millions, and The Rumpus, this kaleidoscopic collection focuses on the lives of hyphenated-Americans with multi-culti roots in the United States and Africa. The book spans genres – literary realism, horror, mystery, YA, science fiction – and features complex, fully-embodied characters: tongue-tied linguistic anthropologists, comic book enthusiasts and even water goddesses. The stories aim to entertain readers while also offering a counterpoint to prevalent “heart of darkness” writing that too often depicts a singular “African” experience plagued by locusts, hunger, and tribal in-fighting.