Mecca Jamilah Sullivan: BIG GIRL (With Bettina Judd)
The Ivy is thrilled to host the paperback launch for Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s extraordinary debut novel, Big Girl! And we’re delighted that Bettina Judd, author of Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought will join Sullivan in conversation.
Exquisitely compassionate and clever, Big Girl is “filled with everyday people who, in Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s gifted hands, show us the love and struggle of what it means to be inside bodies that don’t always fit with the outside world” (Jacqueline Woodson). In tracing the perils and pleasures of the inheritance that comes with being born, Sullivan pushes boundaries and creates an unforgettable portrait of Black womanhood in America.
A native of Harlem, Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the author of Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith A. Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary. She is an associate professor of English at Georgetown University and lives in Washington, DC.
Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist and performer whose research focus is on Black women’s creative production and use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. Her book Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought (Northwestern University Press, December 2022) argues that Black women’s creative production is feminist knowledge production produced by registers of affect she calls “feelin.” She is currently Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.
Her poems and essays have appeared in Feminist Studies, Torch, Mythium, Meridians and other journals and anthologies. Her collection of poems titled patient. which tackles the history of medical experimentation on and display of Black women won the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Book Prize and was released in November of 2014. As a performer she has been invited to perform for audiences within the United States and internationally.
