Black and white headshot of a person with shoulder length locs smiling at the camera. The person is wearing glasses and a floral sweater.

Venita Blackburn

AL Major

Venita Blackburn‘s work has appeared in newyorker.com, Harper’s, Story, McSweeney’s, Apogee, Split Lip Magazine, the Iowa Review, DIAGRAM, Foglifter, Electric Literature, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, and others. She received the Prairie Schooner book prize in fiction for her collected stories, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes in 2017. She is founder of the literary nonprofit Live, Write (livewriteworkshop.com), which provides free creative writing workshops for communities of color. Blackburn’s second collection of stories is How to Wrestle a Girl, 2021, finalist for a Lambda Literary Prize. She is an Associate Professor of creative writing at California State University, Fresno.