Mia McKenzie

Mia will create a video documentary about the particular challenges faced in the schools and communities by mentally gifted African American girls, focusing on middle school-aged girls in West Philadelphia. Through telling her own story as well as helping the girls to tell theirs, Mia hopes to make visible the gifted, young black girls whose stories are rarely told. In this way she believes that young women can be empowered to think of themselves as transcendently special, with abilities and possibilities they might not always be able to see or imagine within the confines of their everyday lives.

Mia is a writer, photographer, visual artist, and filmmaker. She writes literary fiction in the form of short stories, novels and novellas. She creates photography projects with the aim of pushing visual boundaries and challenging the expected. All of her work is heavily grounded in queer issues, women’s issues and the issues of the poor, often all at once. Her short story, Earth, Circa 1989, tackles themes of feminism, bullying, queerness and sexual assault through the point-of-view of a poor, 13-year-old, queer, black girl—a character whose voice is rarely heard in the mainstream. Her novel, The Summer We Got Free, is about a poor family in West Philadelphia in the 1950s-1970s. The story takes on social justice issues including poverty, racism, homophobia, sexism, and inner-city violence. The novel is inspired by the lives of her grandparents, poor black people from the Deep South, who moved to Philadelphia in the 1950s. She has also produced two documentaries, one about queer people of color creating community with each other in Denver, Colorado, and another on her grandmother, who in her own words tells the tale of her life as a girl in the Deep South, growing up in extreme poverty. Mia also created the West Philly Writers Workshop in order to make writing workshops more accessible to established and would-be writers who are poor, particularly women, queer folks, and folks of color.