Literary Arts

Anya Lewis-Meeks is the 2025-2027 Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Literary Arts. A Jamaican writer and recent PhD in English, she writes, researches, and teaches at the intersection between Caribbean and African & American Literatures, speculative fiction and folklore. Her book project, “Spectacular Chaos: Folkloric Caribbean Futures,” argues that Caribbean and Caribbean Diaspora writers use folkloric traditions, rooted in ancestral and cultural heritages and shaped by resistance against racist colonial hierarchies to imagine more just futures for both the region and its people. She is co-author of “Died a small boy: Re-Centering the Human in Geospatial Data from the Middle Passage,” in archipelagos: a journal of Caribbean digital praxis, and her book review of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Dub: Finding Ceremony was published in New West Indian Guide.

 

Lewis-Meeks’ short fiction and essays have been published in LitHub, Triangle House, Nausikâe, Winter Tangerine and elsewhere. Her first novel, Sisterhood, about a Jamaican freshman who joins the only Black sorority at a supposedly post-racial US liberal arts college, is currently on submission to publishers.

 

She holds a PhD from Duke University, an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University and a BA in the Public Policy and International Affairs from Princeton University. She has attended the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and Kimbilio. She is  nonfiction editor at Apogee Journal.