Pembroke Center

Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie (she/her), Ph.D. is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, performer, and scholar. Her research centers liberatory possibilities in the literature and art of people of color. 

Her project “Beyond the Rainbow: The Black Otherwises of Ntozake Shange” weaves together performance studies methodologies, archival research, Black feminist theory, and African-based spirituality. The work explores places of wholeness, joy, and possibility in the literature and creative practices of poet, playwright, performer, Black feminist Ntozake Shange (1948-2018). While Shange’s depictions of Black women’s trauma in her most well-known play “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf” have been the focus of previous scholarship, the full scope and importance of the space of the “otherwise” in Shange’s immense body of work has been largely overlooked by scholars. 

Dr. Tallie’s first academic publication, The Unwieldy Otherwise: Rethinking the Roots of Performance Studies in and through the Black Freedom Struggle co-authored with Leon Hilton was published in the journal Performance Matters. “The Tell-tale Sign of Living: Blackness and Sensuality in Ntozake Shange's Nappy Edges” was published in the The Feminist Press anthology The Weird Sister Collection:Writing at the Intersections of Feminism, Literature, and Pop Culture.

She is also author of the award-winning children’s books Layla’s Happiness, and We Go Slow and the poetry collections Strut and Karma’s Footsteps, and the epistolary work Dear Continuum: Letters to a Poet Crafting Liberation. 

She holds a Ph.D. from Brown University, an MFA from Mills College, and a BA from Clark Atlanta University.