Women We Admire: Eisa Nefertari Ulen
What was your first job?
I have a vivid memory of my mother looking me in the face and telling me, "You're old enough to make some money now." I was 10 (!), and I should add that I do not have a vivid memory of having asked her for money prior to that conversation starter. My mother has lived a feminist life, though I don't know that she's ever called herself one. Maybe because her version of feminism stretches back, through the generations and well before the 2nd wave. Part of being a strong Black woman, according to my mother, and most of the older women around me, was having your own money. She said to me, "You love animals. Why not start your own dog-walking service?" So I did. I walked a neighbor's dog, the neighbor paid me, and I felt just a little more grown up with a few coins tucked in my socks.
What do you do now?
I have crafted a life that provides multiple streams of income and allows me to control the most precious resource of all: my time. I am a writer, and a professor, and the executive director of a small nonprofit that provides summer programming here in Brooklyn, where I live with my husband and son. I manage to garner a few speaking engagements each year, like the DEI workshop I ran for the Tide Risers Rising Higher Summit earlier this fall.
What are you reading now?
I just finished When They Call You A Terrorist, by Patrice Cullors and asha bandle, and it is a powerful book. I highly recommend it. Next up for me is Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. I was so animated by her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns. I'm in a book club, and so I also recently read Bernice McFadden's Sugar, which was literary and beautiful and also a page-turner.
What inspires you?
My family inspires me.
What is one intention you have for the next three months?
I am a writer, so the goal is always to write, and the intention is always to write well.
About Eisa:
Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of Crystelle Mourning (Atria), a novel described by The Washington Post as “a call for healing in the African American community from generations of hurt and neglect.” Eisa is the recipient of a Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center Fellowship for Young African American Fiction Writers, a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and a National Association of Black Journalists Award. Her essays on African American culture have been widely anthologized, most recently “Black Parenting Matters” in Who Do You Serve? Who Do You Protect? (Haymarket), which won the Social Justice / Advocacy Award for 2017 from the School Library Journal’s In the Margins Book Committee.
Eisa has contributed to ReadersDigest.com, The Hollywood Reporter, Essence, Parents, The Washington Post, Ms. Health, Ebony, The Huffington Post, Pen.org, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Root, Truthout, The Defenders Online, The Grio, and Creative Nonfiction. Eisa graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University.
She has taught literature at Hunter College and The Pratt Institute. A founding member of ringShout: A Place for Black Literature, she lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn.