Words are as much about transforming our collective spirit as a people as they are about encouraging us to become survivors of trauma that we didn’t ask for. Writing is my way of analyzing the world and all of its many shades of surrealism. My characters enter a room void of any concern over condescending views-they are just people, evolving in places where there once was only an absence of light. These stories weave themselves from threaded pain, strife, and aborted dreams, they are the blues, my blues. However antsy they become over time, they do mature. They spread their arms into a vast wilderness where only whole beings survive. These words are givers of truth- sometimes bland and sometimes full of cayenne.

Mawiyah Kai EL-Jamah Bomani is a native New Orleanian Writer and Spirit Woman. Mawiyah’s writings have appeared in On a Wednesday Night, I Am New Orleans, The Crab Orchard Review, Dark Eros, Essence Magazine, Catch The Fire, Freeform Magazine, Beyond The Frontier, Kente Cloth, Fertile Ground, Family Portraits, Chicken Bones: A Literary Journal, Survival Digest Quarterly, From A Bend In The River, Thicker Than Water, The House of Misfit’s Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, and Women’s Issues and Feminism in the 21st Century. She is co-writer/director of the play Brown Blood Black Womb. She is also a writer of the plays Spring Chickens, Crows Feet, Bourbon, and Hair Anthem. In 2013 she won the Southern Black Theater Festival’s Playwright of the Year Award for her one-act play, “Spring Chickens.” Mawiyah is also a literary winner of NorthWest Louisiana’s “Critical Mass 8” award for literature and she is a recipient of the Kallenburg Artist Residency for 2021.