Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is an American writer and professor. She is best known for her debut novel Big Girl, published in 2022. She also wrote a short story collection, Blue Talk & Love, which won the 2018 Judith A. Markowitz Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation for emerging LGBTQ writers. Sullivan teaches English at Georgetown University, where she focuses on African-American poetry, Black queer and feminist literature, and creative writing.
Sullivan was born and raised in Harlem, New York. She earned a BA in Afro-American Studies from Smith College in 2003, an MA in English and Creative Writing from Temple University in 2006, and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012.
Her first short story collection, Blue Talk & Love, appeared in 2015 and was praised for its focus on Black queer women written by a Black queer woman. In 2021 she published The Poetics of Difference, a nonfiction book about the writings of Black queer women.
Big Girl is a coming-of-age novel set in Harlem in the 1990s. It follows an eight-year-old Black girl who is obese as she grows up and navigates family, weight, and sexuality. The New York Times described it as a love letter to Black girls who become women too soon and to a version of Harlem that no longer exists. The book also examines how Black girls and women are treated, even by well-meaning people.
Sullivan says coming-of-age stories matter to her. She has cited reading Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy when she was eleven.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 16:24 (CET).