I studied literature and storytelling at Duke University,

Jamie McGhee received a full merit scholarship to Duke University, where she studied creative writing with an emphasis on Middle Eastern and North African storytelling traditions. After pairing English and Arabic studies with degrees in International Comparative Studies and Religion, she graduated in 2016.

then began writing nonfiction books aimed at promoting minority stories.

In 2017, McGhee began writing nonfiction books aimed at telling the stories of people who are underrepresented in literature. Her first book, Who Did It First?, was released in 2020. Game, Set, Sisters!, a biography of Venus and Serena Williams, was released in 2021.

She has also co-authored a project with Duke professor Adam Hollowell, You Mean It or You Don’t: James Baldwin’s Radical Challenge, an interrogation and celebration of James Baldwin’s work in the era of Black Lives Matter. It was released in June 2022.

At the same time, I started studying precolonial and postcolonial storytelling traditions,

Drawn to the study of militant liberation movements within enslaved communities, McGhee began documenting legendary figures. Her first graphic novel, Not Light, But Fire, illuminates the life of Civil War hero Mary Bowser. McGhee is also working with queer Brazilian artist and scholar Julia Ablle on Dandara of Xangô, a trilogy following the female capoeirista who set colonial Brazil ablaze. Both works incorporate circular storytelling motifs, speech and song to refract oral storytelling traditions onto the page.

and began writing for stage and screen to explore those traditions orally.

Through screen- and playwriting, she learned to play with the boundaries of the written, the spoken and the musicalized. While working in Los Angeles, she wrote for Issa Rae Productions and was awarded Amy Poehler’s Upright Citizens Brigade Diversity Fellowship. She now focuses on musical theatre, and is collaborating with Dan Lopez on a musical about intergenerational trauma as framed through Dorian Grey.

I connected with other artists and continued to refine my ideas at residencies.

In 2018, McGhee was named a James Baldwin Writer-in-Residence at La Maison Baldwin in Saint-Paul de Vence, France. She has also been awarded residencies at Instituto Sacatar in Brazil; Vermont Studio Center and Blue Mountain Center in the United States; Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Kunstort Eleven and Zentrum für Kunst Urbanistik in Germany; Wort und Wirkung in Switzerland; Sa Taronja Associació Cultural in Spain; Mauser EcoHouse in Costa Rica; and KARP Kamina in Togo. She has taken advanced workshops at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Summer Program), Cave Canem and Catapult.

Other awards include first place in the Rosati Awards for Creative Writing, first place in the Anne Flexner Prize for Poetry and second place in the Reynolds Price Fiction Awards.

Now I’m based in Berlin.

Here, McGhee is working on her second novel, a speculative linguistic project about the transformation of the German language.