Jada Renée Allen is a writer, educator, and conjure woman from Chicago, Illinois. A 2022 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest winner, she has received fellowships, scholarships, and support from Tin House, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Community of Writers, and VONA, among others. Her work either appears or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day,” Hayden’s Ferry Review, Paris Review Daily, Virginia Quarterly Review, Wildness, and elsewhere. She has received grants from the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Currently, she lives upon U.S.-occupied O’odham Jewed, Akimel O’odham, and Hohokam lands.
Discussing topics of gender, sexuality, childhood, home & the spirit, Moyo (from the Kikongo meaning ‘womb’) is a curative cry against the backdrop of transmisogynoir. Moyo seeks to reframe cycles of birth, death, & rebirth from a Black trans lens (which is to say an ancestral one).