Dr. Kokahvah Zauditu-Selassie

Dr. Kokahvah Zauditu-Selassie, “Mama Koko” holds the Bachelor of Science degree in Speech Pathology and Audiology, a Master of Science degree in Reading, the MFA degree in Creative Writing and the Doctorate of Arts degree in the Interdisciplinary Humanities. Recently retired as Professor of English she was a 2009-2010 Fulbright Scholar at the University of Cocody, Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, a National Council for Black Studies fellow at the University of Ghana, Legon, a Fulbright-Hays fellow in Cairo, Egypt, a New York University Scholar-in-Residence, a Mellon fellow at the Gorée Institute in Dakar, Senegal, and a Fulbright-Hays Scholar in the Republic of South Africa. She is the author of “Dancing Between Two Realms: Sacred Resistance and Remembrance in African American Culture,” “I Got a Home in Dat Rock: Memory, Orisa, and Yoruba Spiritual Identity in African American Literature” in Orisa: Yoruba Gods and Spiritual Identity in Africa and the Diaspora, as well as several journal articles including, “Women Who Know Things: African Epistemologies, Ecocriticism, and Female Spiritual Authority in the Novels of Toni Morrison. She is also the author of a book of critical essays titled, African Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison a 2009 publication of the University Press of Florida, which won the best book award from the Toni Morrison Society in Paris, 2010. Her short stories are featured in Volumes one and two of The Fire Within, an anthology of Black women’s writing. Her novel is titled, The Second Line. A gifted storyteller, her literary imagination is peopled by women adept in making poison, root women, stargazers, astral travelers, shape-shifters, abandoned children, maroons, and lonely widows in search of sexual satisfaction. She writes the words that her ancestors whisper bringing those otherworldly interactions alive. A priest of Obàtálá in the Lukumi Yoruba tradition, she is a descendant of a matrilineal group of Hoodoo believers from New Orleans, Louisiana.