Tameka Cage Conley

Tameka Cage Conley is a graduate of the fiction program of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was awarded the Truman Capote Fellowship and the Provost Postgraduate Visiting Writer Fellowship in Fiction. Her work is published in Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Callaloo, The African American Review and elsewhere.

She has received writing fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Cave Canem Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Vermont Studio Center. The opera for which she wrote the libretto, A Gathering of Sons, was awarded the Bronze Medal in the Society and Social Issues category of the New York Festivals TV and Film Awards.

Cage Conley received her PhD from Louisiana State University in 2006, where she was a recipient of the Huel Perkins Doctoral Fellowship and recipient of the Lewis Simpson Distinguished Dissertation Award for her dissertation, Painful Discourses: Borders, Regions, and Representations of Female Circumcision from Africa to America. She is at work on her first novel, You, Your Father, an epic family saga that considers the untimely deaths of African American men over six decades beginning in the early 1940s in northern Louisiana. An excerpt of the novel is forthcoming in the Spring 2021 edition of The Iowa Review.