Mikael Awake

Instructor

As a writer and educator of East African descent based in New York, my writing and teaching revolves around stories of and connections between places and people. I collaborated with underground fashion icon Daniel R. Day on Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem, a 2019 New York Times bestseller. My fiction has appeared in Callaloo, Witness, and McSweeney’s Quarterly, while my reported essays and culture writing have appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, and New York Magazine. I went to the Syracuse MFA program and have taught at City College of New York’s Division of Interdisciplinary Study and am currently an Assistant Professor at Lafayette College. At the moment, I am working on a narrative history of outdoor basketball mecca Rucker Park to be published in North America by Pantheon.