03/12/2024
🌟 WRITER SPOTLIGHT - Exodus Oktavia Brownlow
Exodus’s essay “When the World Was Ending We Wore The Cornrows, We Twisted Our Coils, and We Waited” was published in Issue Volume 30 of QAE and recently selected for the 2024 Volume of Best American Essays as notable! Congratulations Exodus! Read more about her work below ⬇️
Exodus Oktavia Brownlow is a writer, sewist, author and editor native to Blackhawk, Ms. She is a graduate of Mississippi Valley State University with a BA in English, and Mississippi University for Women with an MFA in Creative Writing. She is an associate editor at Fractured Lit and is the Editor-in-Chief of The Loveliest Review. Exodus has been published or has forthcoming work with Electric Lit, West Branch, Denver Quarterly, F(r)iction, BOOTH CRAFT and more. She has been nominated for Best of The Net, Best MicroFiction, Best Small Fictions and a Pushcart Prize. Her pieces “Chicken-Girls and Chicken-Ladies and All the Possibility of Pillowcases” and “It’s 5am-ish, and My Father Tells Me A Story From His Time in Singapore” were included in Best MicroFiction 2021 and 2022.
Her piece “The Terrible Darling” was featured as a Wigleaf Top 50 2022 selection. She is the recipient of the 2022 “The Changing American South” fellowship at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Exodus also received a Mississippi Arts Commission Grant for an Individual Nonfiction Artist Fellowship in 2023.
Exodus’ essay “When the World Was Ending We Wore the Cornrows, We Twisted Our Coils, and We Waited” was selected for Best American Essays 2024 as notable.
Exodus is the author of a fiction chapbook—“Look at All The Little Hurts of These Newly-Broken Lives and The Bittersweet, Sweet and Bitter Loves”—which was published with Ethel Zine and Press in the Spring of 2023. Additionally, Exodus is the author of a debut collection of essays—“I’m Afraid That I Know Too Much About Myself Now, To Go Back To Who I Knew Before, And Oh Lord, Who Will I Be After I’ve Known All That I Can?” [a Mississippi Top (ten) Reads with The Clarion Ledger debuting at #6], was published with ELJ Editions in the Summer of 2023. Her favorite color is green.
Quarter After Eight is an annual literary journal devoted to the exploration of innovative writing. / Twitter:
