Tameka Cage Conley, PorchLight Writer-in-Residence Reading

PorchLight is proud to host Tameka Cage Conley for our inaugural summer residency. Our residencies will offer writers working on book-length projects deeply discounted stays in either the Hazel Westgate Artist's Retreat at PorchLight Literary Arts Center, or at PorchLight's downtown Market House condominium. 

Tameka Cage Conley, PhD is a graduate of the fiction program of the Iowa Writers' Workshop where she was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship and the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship in Fiction. Her work is published Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Callaloo, The African American Review and elsewhere. She has received writing fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Vermont Studio Center. The opera for which she wrote the libretto, A Gathering of Sons, was awarded the Bronze Medal in the Society and Social Issues category of the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards. She is at work on her first novel, You, Your Father--an epic family saga that considers the untimely deaths of African American men and boys over six decades beginning in the early 1940s in northern Louisiana. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Oxford College of Emory University where her poem, "Among Us," was unveiled and mounted  on the walls of Oxford's Johnson Hall.