Serena Simpson

Serena Simpson is a prose writer from Chicago, IL. She has published essays in Barrelhouse and Ninth Letter. She won the Guild Complex’s 2018 Leon Forest Prose Award for nonfiction, was named a 2019 Tin House Scholar, awarded the 2020 Disquiet Prize for nonfiction, and selected as a 2021 Sewanee Nonfiction Scholar. Serena earned a BA in English at Spelman College, an MA in Writing and Publishing at DePaul University, and both an MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English Literature at Northwestern University. She has lead community-based writing workshops for Black writers and served as a writing consultant and editor for over ten years. Serena writes voice and character-driven narratives and Black womanist cultural criticism. Her work is frequently concerned with exploring memory, place, and the overlap, interstices, and interplay between them.