Anika NailahWhether bringing together homeless women to write poetry around a kitchen table at a day shelter in Cambridge, MA, facilitating the publishing of young people's work in a public housing community, or performing liberation poetry in cross-racial envirnments, Anika Nailah, a cultural liberationist, social justice consultant, performer, and author, helps people bring forth the voice within that longs for expression. She has taught fiction and creative nonfiction at Wheaton College, adult basic literacy and thesis research skills at Cambridge College, and anti-racism at Smith College's School for Social Work. Anika is also the founder and former director of Books of Hope, a Boston-based, youth literacy program, that engages young people to write, publish, and sell their own books. A Black Writers Alliance Gold Pen Award Nominee, her first book, Free and Other Stories, was chosen as one of the best short story collections of 2002 by Black Issues Book Review and was selected for inclusion in The New York Public Library's 2003 Books for the Teen Age List. Her short story, Draggin' the Dog, was also published in Gumbo: An Anthology of African American Writing and broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Americana series. Currently residing in New England, providing social justice consulting and writing coaching, she holds healing space to interrupt racism across the USA. Read More Read Less