Dora King is a writer, teacher, and poet who mines the interstices of geography, religion, and art to address the sublimated histories of loss associated with the aftermath of slavery and colonialism, and the silent histories of familial grief. Her current poetry project is a meditation on melancholic poetics, the visual and writerly in-between of incomplete mourning, where the elegy, poetry’s midwife, meets Africa’s high art, the masquerade. She is also working on a nonfiction narrative about post-war Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, as a city of conversion. Though born in Freetown, she is descended from liberated slaves captured in Nigeria circa 1823, raised in Kenya, and educated in New York City. She says of the city she calls a country, “New York is breath and bone. I was born here the first time I arrived here.”
King was most recently a facilitator with a joint Racial Equity/Protester Sanctuary project and a member of the Judson Arts team of Judson Memorial Church, where she curated a series on the Borderlands and participated in conversations about Judson Arts’ post-pandemic program design. Previously, she was a consulting anthropologist for a consortium of international child protection agencies on a research project in rural Sierra Leone, training and leading research teams on ethnographic research methods and on the ethics of research in humanitarian contexts. She earned an MA in religion from Union Theological Seminary, an MPhil in cultural anthropology from Columbia University, and an MFA in poetry from Columbia’s School of Art.
