Mariah M., or M. is a non-binary Black creative, disruptor, cultureworker, and abolitionist/worldbuilder rooting in Greensboro, Afro-Carolina (ancestrally Keyauwee & Sauna Nations).

M. holds the honor of being a 2024-2025 Mellon Community fellow with the Diaspora Solidarity Lab, 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. ‘23). 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. ‘17), a Watering Hole Fellow (c. ‘17, ‘19), 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’ve most recently brought their strategic programming expertise to SISTORIES Literary, as the Program Director of the biennial fellowship, the Luminary Editorial Incubator for Black Feminist Writers. This program nurtured 6 Black queer creatives in the art of publishing and study ot the ends of composing Issue V of SISTORIES litmag. SISTORIES believes in preseving and expanding on the Black literary tradition rooted in communal and professional development of Black writers based in the American Souf.

M was also a Leadership Development Specialist within their political home, NC BLOC (Black Leadership & Organizing Collective, c. ‘25) in addition of being trained as a Queerly Beloved fellow (c. ‘25), a BOLD Amandla (c. ‘18) and an Emergent Strategies (c. ‘19) alumnus. They’ve worked and volunteered as an organizer in such formations as Durham Beyond Policing, BYP100 and others in this marathon ran in order to achieve our collective 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*