Incandescent

Ayodele Nzinga is a multi-hyphenated artist; a brilliant actress, producing director, playwright, poet, dramaturg, performance consultant, educator, and community advocate. She is the director of the Lower Bottom Playaz, Inc., Oakland's oldest North American African Theater Company and founder of Lower Bottom Playaz Summer Theater Day Camp. She is co-founder of Janga's House a Black Women Arts collective and a founding member of BlacSpace Collective. Nzinga is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Oakland CA. She is the author of Performing Literacy: A Narrative Inquiry into Performance Pedagogy in a Marginalized Community (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2015), THE HORSE EATERS (Nomadic Press, 2017), SORROWLAND ORACLE (Nomadic Press, 2022), and Incandescent (Not a Pipe Publishing, 2021) and her work can be found in numerous journals and anthologies. Nzinga, a cultural anchor, is part theoretician and part partitioner. She describes herself as a cultural architect invested in creating structures for culture making.