Mariah M., or M. is a non-binary Black creative, disruptor, culture worker, and abolitionist/worldbuilder based in Greensboro, Afro-Carolina (ancestrally Occaneechi band of the Saponi Nation).

M. holds the honor of being a 2024 Speculative Fiction fellow of the Roots.Wounds.Words Winter Storytellers of Color workshop as well as the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at The Beautiful Project (c. 2023). TBP uses storytelling via various artforms, primarily photography, to the ends of the creative development and self-efficacy of Black girls, gender expansive youth & women.

They are an Emergent Poet Fellow of the National Poetry Foundation* and Crescendo Literary (c. 2017), a Watering Hole Fellow (c. 2017, 2019), and a founding member and LightSower of SaltWater Sojourn, a Blkqueer-autonomous collective of creatives based in North Carolina that believe in the transformative power art can have on the collective.

M. is the former Creative Director at the Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause (c.’19-’24), a storytelling advocacy platform centering the lived experiences of Black folk born with uteruses striving to use narrative change to shift the reproductive justice landscape, our communities and our selves.

They have created as a teaching artist for such organizations as Movement of Youth, My Brother’s Keeper, the Boys and Girls Club of America, and within the North Carolina public, private and Montessori School systems, a program director/coordinator for spaces like Blackspace LLC, The Beautiful Project and within SaltWater Sojourn as well as an organizer in such formations as Durham Beyond Policing, BYP100 and others, in the marathon to be ran to achieve Black liberation.

*Mariah is one of the 2000+ poets and writers who boycotted The Poetry Foundation due to their censorship of anti-genocide/pro-Palestinian voices & lack of an anti-imperialist stance considering today’s reality. This boycott has since concluded as of March 2024*