BIOGRAPHY

Ajanae Dawkins is a writer, theologian, and educator. She received a degree in English Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin as a First Wave, Hip-hop and Urban Arts scholar, and her MFA in poetry from Randolph College. She has performed and featured at venues across the country and has opened for the United Nations Secretary of Sexual Violence in Conflict and Nikki Giovanni. She has been published in The Rumpus, Frontier Poetry, Underbelly, The Ecotheo Review, The BreakBeat Poets Black Girl Magic Anthology, The Offing, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Winter Tangerine, and more. Her work has been featured on For Harriet, Def Jam, and Button Poetry. She’s been awarded artist of the year by Delta Sigma Theta sorority incorporated. Ajanae is the winner of the Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s Editors Prize, a finalist for the Cave Canem Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, and a finalist for the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins poetry prize. She has also been nominated for Best of the Net. She is a two-time individual finalist for the Rustbelt regional slam, crowning her as one of the top five poets in the midwest, twice. In 2015, she debuted her one-woman show, Atlantic at the Overture Center. She is a fellow of The Watering Hole’s writer’s retreat for African American writers and Pink Door writer’s retreat. She was also a contributing writer for the Theatre Lila, theater company. She has been featured in Ebony Magazine for the Faces of Frustration: A Year of Racial Protest. She is currently a host of VS Podcast with the poetry foundation and the Theology Editor for the EcoTheo Review. She is a Masters of Theology candidate at Methodist Theological School of Ohio.