Meri Nana Ama Danquah

Performance artist and poet, Meri Nana Ama Danquah is a perfect role model who reminds us of the strength and resilience we posses as women to bounce back from adversity regardless of how deep and dark the trenches we fall into. Meri – who’s family emigrated from Ghana to the United States when she was six - was a young working-class broke single mother when she suffered from a variety of depressive symptoms after she gave birth to her daughter, which led her to suspect she was going crazy. Understanding the importance of strength in a world that often undervalues black women's lives, she shrouded her illness in silence and denial until penning her moving memoir Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Though Depression. In this book, she talks about her trying experience as a minority who experiences a “disabling major depression” a common effect triggered by the all-too-consuming process of assimilation. She charts the costs of this lifelong battle: disrupted relationships, broken friendships, several promising careers disrupted, and a college education left incomplete. The Washington Post hailed the book as "a vividly textured flower of a memoir that will surely stand as one of the finest to come along in years." As a result of this groundbreaking work, Meri Danquah was featured on The Today Show, Lifetime Television for Women, ABC World News Tonight, and she was the subject of two documentaries on the topic of depression. She was also chosen by the National Mental Health Association to be the national spokesperson for their "Campaign on Clinical Depression," an initiative that specifically targeted African American women and was launched in cooperation with organizations such as the National Council of Negro, the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and the National Association of Black Social Workers. In this capacity, she toured the nation delivering speeches and addressing audiences at conferences, workshops, in churches and at book stores, with the aim of promoting awareness of clinical depression in order to lessen the existing stigma in African communities surrounding the disorder. In 2000, at the age of 32, she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Welcome Back Awards organization, an alliance of mental health advocacy groups. She also returned to Ghana, where she held a Visiting Scholar appointment at the University of Ghana's School of Communications Studies, where she taught graduate level courses in Print Journalism. Meri Danquah's writing has been featured in magazines and newspapers such as the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, Allure, Essence, Emerge and Los Angeles Magazine. She has published numerous book reviews, first person essays and personality profiles. Her fiction and poetry have been widely anthologized in both national and international journals, magazines and anthologies. She was the recipient of a Pauline and Henry Louis Gates, Sr. fellowship from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, as well as a California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction. She earned her MFA degree in Creative Writing and Literature, with an emphasis in Creative Nonfiction, from Bennington College. Meri Danquah is the editor of two anthologies: Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women, published in 2000 by Hyperion, and Shaking The Tree: A Collection of New Fiction and Memoir by Black Women, which was published in 2003 by W.W. Norton & Co. Currently, she is completing a creative nonfiction book for Riverhead, writing a young adult novel about immigration for Scholastic, and editing another anthology for Norton. She lives in Los Angeles with her daughter.