“We like to think that men are simple. Feed ’em and love ’em and that’s all they need. But they more complicated than that. They do some great things and then turn ’round and commit some of the worst sins ever thought of.” (197)
EVERYMAN
M SHELLY CONNER, PHD
Essayist / Playwright / Fiction / Screenwriter
Chicago native M Shelly Conner spent her summers bouncing between her grandmother in Memphis and relatives in Los Angeles, reveling in the sprawl of the Great Migration. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. A multi-genre writer, she is the creator of the Quare Life web series and has published essays on dapperqueer aesthetics, black womanhood, self-sustainable living and their intersections in various publications including: the A.V. Club; the Grio; Playboy Magazine; and Crisis Magazine. An excerpt of everyman appears in the Obsidian Journal of Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora. Conner is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas and lives with her wife and their dog Whiskey on their Arkansas homestead.
EDUCATION AND CAREER
M Shelly Conner received her B.A. in English from Tuskegee University, M.A. in Education from Concordia University - River Forest, and Ph.D in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago where she wrote everyman as her creative dissertation. Shelly taught in Chicago Public Schools for a decade before working as an educational consultant for several private education companies. She is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas.Around The Web
- I am a dapperqueer Black woman. It means that I’m more at home in bowties and wingtips than dresses and kitten heels. To be honest, it […]
- Published March 22, 2019, The Crisis Magazine When UK-based production company Impossible Factual approached Yoruba Richen in the summer of 2017 to helm a new documentary […]
- Published in “AfterEllen” Dresses did not make me feel feminine; they made me feel vulnerable. I realize that vulnerability is a key element to the social […]
- Published- December 10, 2014-Black Girl Dangerous. My mother once asked me why everything I wrote had to be black and queer. A Great Migration southern transplant, […]
- Published March 8th, 2016, Media Literacy Now Whether you watched the Academy Awards or not, we all waited with bated breath to see comedian Chris Rock […]
- “Ain’t I a woman?” Black feminist pioneer Sojourner Truth famously asked that question of an all-white audience of abolitionists and suffragettes in 1861, to point out […]
