Chidelia Edochie

Biography

Chidelia lived, painted, and wrote in the southern Chinese city of Guǎngzhōu before making the move to Indiana, where Sycamore Review is headquartered. Here she served as Nonfiction Editor & Book Review Coordinator from 2010-2011. She is Nigerian-American, born in the Midwest, raised in the Deep South, and lived and studied in Spain and France before settling down in Guǎngzhōu. Chidelia is currently at work on a novel that explores the black immigrant experience in China, as well as themes of expatriate culture, economic imperialism, loss, longing and love. She will be the Writer-in-Residence at the M-Residency in Shanghai in 2012.

Chidelia’s fiction and nonfiction appear in Utne Reader, Gulf Coast Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Passages North, The Journal, The Los Angeles Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Camera Obscura, and the New Rivers Press anthology American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers. Her work has also won numerous awards, including a literary grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation; the Joan Jakobson Award “given to writers of unusual promise” granted by the Wesleyan Writers Conference; a scholarship in Fiction granted by AWP; finalist honors in the Third Coast Fiction Contest and Crab Orchard Review Charles Johnson Student Fiction contest; and has made the Top 25 List in Glimmer Train’s Short-Story Award for New Writers.

Contact

Chidelia can be contacted at Chidelia [dot] Edochie [at] gmail [dot] com, and followed at Twitter.

Chidelia & National Book Award finalist Patricia Henley

Chidelia with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey