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, and Vive Toussaint, which follows the titular Haitian revolutionary, will be released in 2025.

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 is currently collaborating with composer Dan Lopez on a musical about intergenerational trauma as framed through Dorian Grey.

I received fellowships to investigate gaps in the archive,

McGhee’s work has been supported by fellowships from Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Zürich University of the Arts, Emory University and University of Miami. She has also been awarded art grants through Folger Shakespeare Library, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the Arts & Science Council.

and attended residencies to refine my ideas and my work.

Art residencies have allowed McGhee to further explore the intersections of language and colonial memory. These residencies include Instituto Sacatar in Brazil, La Maison Baldwin in France, Künstlerdorf Schöppingen in Germany and Nawat Fes in Morocco. She has also attended Vermont Studio Center and Blue Mountain Center in the United States, Wort und Wirkung in Switzerland, Proto Produkciia’s Peripheries in Ukraine and Karp Kamina in Togo.

Parallel to this, she has taken advanced workshops at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Summer Program), Cave Canem and Catapult.

Now I’m based in Berlin.

Here, McGhee is working on Where Language Was Lost, a speculative linguistic project about the transformation of the German language. She also teaches writing workshops and advises students at Humboldt Universität (Berlin), School of Visual Arts (NYC) and University of Illinois (Chicago).