Hannah Eko
(she/her) Guest/Teaching Artist
Hannah Shokoya Eko is a first-generation Nigerian-American first daughter who never became a lawyer, doctor, or engineer. She did however attend five years of military school and graduate from the US Merchant Marine Academy, during which she completed a thesis on Black ethnomusicology. After serving as a US Coast Guard officer for six years, she embarked on her longtime writer dreams. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Fiction from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019 with university-level recognition for her fiction and nonfiction work. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Buzzfeed, Bust, b*tch, make/shift, Pigeon Pages NYC, and Aster(ix) magazines. She is a 2021 California Arts Council Emerging Fellow, a 2019 recipient of the Advancing Black Arts Grant, a Peter R. Taylor Kenyon Fellow, Tin House Scholar, and VONA (Voices Of Our Nations) alum. She has taught writing workshops at Catapult, Smith College, Bloomsburg University, and at White Whale Bookstore. She is the creator of the salon-style writing movement Women, Writing, Weed & Wine, a founding member of the Portland WOC Zine Collective, co-founder of the Los Angeles based reading series Palindrome alongside Tanya Shirazi-Galvez, and leads the Honeyknife Academy: The Premiere Finishing School for Emerging Writers.