Julie Iromuanya

Fiction

Julie Iromuanya’s creative writing and critical work are concerned with the African Diaspora, global blackness, and the experience of African immigrants in the United States. Literature of the so-called “neo-African American,” caught at the nexus between African Anglophone and African American literature, has revealed much about longstanding intersectional issues related to race, economics, gender, and citizenship.  

Julie Iromuanya is the author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature (9 Mobile Prize for Literature), and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction. Her scholarly-critical work most recently appears in Callaloo: A Journal of African American Arts and Letters and Meridians: Feminism, Race,Transnationalism and is forthcoming in Afropolitan Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury Publishing).  

She was the inaugural Herbert W. Martin Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton. She has also been a Kimbilio Fellow, Jane Tinkham Broughton Fellow in Fiction at Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference, a Bread Loaf Bakeless/Camargo France Fellow, a Brown Foundation Fellow at the Dora Maar House, a Jan Michalski Fellow at “The Treehouses,” and the Eternal Vada Fellow at Sangam House. Her work has also been supported by fellowships and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Ragdale Foundation, Villa Lena, and Villa Ruffieux. Iromuanya earned her B.A. at the University of Central Florida and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she was a Presidential Fellow, Richard H. Larson Fellow, and award-winning teacher. She is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at the University of Chicago.  

Julie Iromuanya has served as a thesis adviser, committee member, and mentor for graduate and undergraduate students in creative writing, literature, and visual arts. In 2017 she coordinated a graduate student panel at the Thinking Its Presence Conference on Race, Creative Writing, and Art.   

• Advanced Fiction Workshop: Writing Social Change 
• Africana Literature: Slavery and the Literary Imagination 
• Deconstructing Race, Deconstructing Identity 
• Fundamentals Seminar: The Aesthete Speaks 
• Intro to Genres: Africana Speculative Fiction 
• Intro to Genres: Coming of Age in African Literature 
• Technical Seminar in Fiction: Literary digressions 
• The Rhetoric of Humor in African American Discourse 

Books and Short stories 

• Mr. and Mrs. Doctor. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2015, 304 pages. 
• “Only in America.” Tampa Review. 43/44. (fall 2012): 41-48.  
• “Aunty Stays.” Passages North. 32.1 (spring 2011): 44-52.  
• “An Arranged Honeymoon.” The Kenyon Review. 32.4 (fall 2010): 93-103.  

Articles and Book Chapters

• “Are We All Feminists? The Global Black Hair Industry and Marketplace in Chimamanda Ngozi  
• Adichie’s Americanah.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 16, no. 1, 2018, pp. 163–83. 
• “Humor as Deconstructive Apparatus in Bernardine Evaristo’s Blonde Roots.” Callaloo: A Journal of  
• African Diaspora Arts and Letters. The Neo-Slave Narrative Genre. A Special Issue: Part 1. Eds. Joan Anim-Addo and Maria Helena Lima. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, vol. 40, no. 4, spring 2017. 174–182. 
• “The Middleman Speaks: Race, Citizenship, and Labor in the Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears.”  
• Converging Identities: Blackness in the Modern African Diaspora. Eds. Julius O. Adekunle and Hettie V. Williams. Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press. 2013. 83-93.