Kelechi Ubozoh

Kelechi Ubozoh is a Nigerian-American writer, consultant, and mental health advocate who blends the reality of trauma, race, and mental health into poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Kelechi was the first undergraduate ever published in The New York Times. Kelechi co-hosts and co-curates the Bay Area submission-based reading series MoonDrop Productions with Cassandra Dallett. She reads in literary spaces across the Bay including; Better Ancestors, Red Light Lit, The Racket, Lyrics and Dirges, Birds of Paradise, Quiet Lightning, and Word Party. A popular performer, Kelechi has performed at the Berkeley Poetry Festival (2024) (2019), Oakland’s Beast Crawl (2016-2017) (2022-2023), San Francisco’s Litquake (2018-2019) (2022), Sonoma Community Writer’s Festival (2024), and The Bay Area Book Festival (2022). For three years she has performed at Litcrawl with Cocoa Fly, an all-black women troupe, and shared poetry about afro surrealism, mental health, and trauma. Her book with LD Green, We’ve Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health (North Atlantic), elevates marginalized voices who have endured psychiatric mistreatment. The book, which includes poetry and essays on the subject of menta health, is part of the curriculum at Boston University, New York University, and Cal State East Bay. Kelechi’s other work appears in Argot Magazine, sParkle & bLINK, Multiplicity, Endangered Species, Enduring Values, Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color, Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives (Chicago Review Press), and the forthcoming anthology When We Exhale (Black Freighter Press). In 2022, Kelechi received a Pushcart Prize nomination. She is currently working on an Afrofuturistic young adult novel. Learn more at kelechiubozoh.com