Biography
Eliamani Ismail is a writer and filmmaker from Washington, D.C., via Mali and Tanzania. A former youth poet with the DC Youth Slam Team, she has performed at venues including the Kennedy Center and Planned Parenthood’s National Conference. She earned a B.A. in Film and Africana Studies from Scripps College and was later named a T.J. Watson Fellow, traveling to 10 countries to study storytelling traditions and their relationship to national identity and non-punitive justice. Her writing has been supported by fellowships from the Aspen Institute, Kimbilio for Black Fiction, Brooklyn Poets, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
A Pan-Africanist committed to telling stories from across the global African world, Eliamani is currently an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Maryland, where she teaches undergraduate writing. She also serves as a fiction editor at Lampblack Magazine. Eliamani lives in Brooklyn where she is at work on her first novel.