In today's episode I speak with novelist, author, and professor Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D. Our conversation focuses on her coming of age young adult debut novel Big Girl.

Mecca is the author of the novel Big Girl, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel, Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary, and The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA. She has earned honors from Bread Loaf, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Fiction, the NEA and others. Originally from Harlem, NY, she is an Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University and lives in Washington DC.