Mission

Tyriek White is a University of Mississippi MFA graduate and our community engagement and design specialist, who makes sure that Lampblack’s vision is expressed across all our digital platforms. His first novel, We Are A Haunting, is about a young man in East New York, Brooklyn, who, while mourning the loss of his mother, discovers they share a gift, the ability to see and communicate with those who have passed on. This novel, about making and sustaining community and connection to family, history, and ancestral spirit, will be published with Astra House.

Bird Jackson (she / they) is an Afro-gothic writer based in Newark, New Jersey. Their writing blends horror, folklore, and the celebration of Black femmes as they battle gods, monsters, and generational curses. Bird is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Rutgers University-Newark, where they currently teach, and is the Editorial Director of Lampblack literary magazine. She is a returning Anaphora Literary Arts Fellow, and attended the winter and summer residencies in 2023 and 2024.

Attorious Renée Augustin is the host of Lampblack’s Instagram Live Series, “The Inky Bulb” and a nonbinary (they/them), queer, performance poet, filmmaker, and educator from Wanamassa, NJ. Their work focuses on transformation and community, and their hope is for their art to serve as a catalyst in the liberation of all people from oppressive systems. Attorious is an MFA Candidate at Rutgers University- Newark, and an artist-in-residence with New Jersey Preforming Arts Center, where they were co-artistic director of NJPac’s 2022 performance, “Phronesis: A Focus on Frequency.”

Thierry Kehou is a board member at Lampblack and a writer and literary translator from French. He holds a BA in Individualized Study from New York University’s Gallatin School and an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University Newark. His writing has appeared in Departures Magazine, The Huron River Review, Lampblack, and elsewhere. His working translation of Francis Bebey’s Three Little Shoeshiners has received support from the Breadloaf Translators’ Conference and was longlisted for the 2020 John Dryden Translation Competition. His translation of Jean d'Amérique’s debut novel Soleil à coudre will be published by Other Press in 2023.

Eva Lynch-Comer is on the events team at Lampblack and is an Afro-Latina and African American poet with Costa Rican ancestry. She is a Creative Writing MFA student and teaching fellow at Hollins University. Eva holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Hamilton College where she received the John V. A. Weaver Prize in Poetry and the Sydna Stern Weiss Essay Prize in Women’s Studies. She is a two-time pushcart prize nominee, and her work has appeared in over 15 literary magazines. Her writing centers on themes of healing, social justice, the divine feminine, music, nature, and magic. In her free time, Eva enjoys singing, drinking tea, and walking her dog Osito.

Lyndon Nicholas runs the Direct Aid program at Lampblack and is a Brooklyn-based writer and a 2023 Periplus Fellow with an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York and a BA in English from Northeastern University. His fiction work is upcoming or published by The North American Review, Promethean, PREE, The Dillydoun Review, The Stonecoast Review, and elsewhere. His work was included in the anthology It Was All A Dream: An Anthology of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right released by Hungry Shadow Press. He was the winner of City College of New York’s Stark Short Fiction Prize, a finalist for the Kurt Vonnegut Prize in Speculative Fiction from the North American Review, and a semifinalist for Solstice Review’s 2022 Annual Literary Contest. He is currently working on a collection of short stories which incorporates Trinidadian folklore and carnival characters into works of speculative fiction.