Tameka Cage Conley, PhD is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She currently holds the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship in fiction and teaches advanced fiction writing at the University of Iowa. As a literary artist, she writes fiction, poetry, plays, librettos and essays. She received a doctoral degree in English in 2006 from Louisiana State University, where she was a recipient of the Huel Perkins Doctoral Fellowship. Her dissertation, Painful Discourses: Borders, Regions, and Representations of Female Circumcision from Africa to America, was awarded the annual Lewis Simpson Distinguished Dissertation Award. She has received writing fellowships from the Cave Canem Poetry Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Squaw Valley Writers Conference and Workshops. Her work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Callaloo, African American Review, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her first novel, a family epic that chronicles the untimely deaths of African American men over six decades in Caddo Parish.