Jeannetta Craigwell-Graham is a Caribbean African American writer and recipient of the 2023 de Groot Courage to Write prize and a 2021 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar. Her writing has appeared in swamp pink, Indiana Review, X-R-A-Y Magazine, Litmosphere, as a second-place finisher in their 2023 Lit/South Awards in Fiction, among other publications.
She is also the co-host/producer of The Write Attention Podcast and co-founder of the nonprofit Black Women Writers in Europe, a non-profit organization devoted to promoting Black women writers in Europe.
She is currently working on a novel trilogy incorporating family history and horror mythology from the African Diaspora beginning with the novel-in-progress, What Time Is It Mr. Wolf, a mythologized account of her uncle's real-life struggle with mental illness as a Black boy growing up in Baltimore public housing in the 1950-70s as he navigates the turbulence of the times, the social dynamics of a historically black university, and post-war Germany as a Fulbright student. His mental unraveling is explored through the figurative lens of a werewolf transformation. The novel navigates themes such as the meaning of time, the Black achievement trap and sexual agency.
At MacDowell, Craigwell-Graham worked on a multi-generational Transatlantic novel exploring the connection between music and possession in African diaspora spiritual traditions. The novel is part of a trilogy of speculative genealogy where she uses familial and public archives and supernatural folklore to reimagine her family history in worlds where spooks and monsters live among us. She will use her de Groot Foundation Courage to Write prize to support onsite research for her novel.
