Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer, racial justice organizer, and urban planner. She is the author of Aftershocks: A Memoir, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2021, and selected as a BookExpo America “Buzz” book. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review Daily, Catapult, Quartz, The Washington Post’s The Lily and other publications. She was the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. As an Associate Director at Living Cities, Nadia leads the organization’s racial equity and inclusion and applied research portfolios. Recent highlights include spearheading efforts to articulate a new mission and vision that centers dismantling structural racism; designing equitable processes for hiring, talent management, and distributed leadership; developing a digital platform for practitioners working to close racial income and wealth gaps; and facilitating a multi-city effort focused on operationalizing racial equity and inclusion in local government operations, policy, and practice. Nadia is a graduate of Pace University (BA), Hunter College (MS), and of the Mountainview MFA program where she now teaches creative non-fiction.