Chinaka Hodge

Chinaka Hodge is an American poet, educator, playwright and screenwriter. She has received national recognition for her publications, especially her artistic work on gentrification.

Biography

Chinaka Hodge was born in Oakland, California and lived in various neighborhoods of the city throughout the course of her childhood.^[1] In May 2006, Hodge graduated from NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and was honored to be the student speaker at the 174th Commencement exercise. Four years later, Chinaka received USC's Annenberg Fellowship to continue her studies at its School of Cinematic Arts. She received her MFA in Writing for Film and TV in 2012. In the fall of that year, she was awarded the SF Foundation's Phelan Literary Award for emerging Bay Area talent. Hodge was also a 2012 Artist in Residence at The Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, CA. In January 2013, Hodge was a Sundance Feature Film lab Fellow for her script, "700th&Int'l." In June 2013 Chinaka began as a first year fellow at Cave Canem’s summer retreat.^[2]

Work and publications

For the past ten years, Hodge has worked in various capacities at Youth Speaks/The Living Word Project, a San Francisco-based literary arts non-profit. During her tenure there, Chinaka served as Program Director, Associate Artistic Director, and worked directly with Youth Speaks’ core population as a teaching artist and poet mentor.^[3] She has acted in comparable capacities in New York and Los Angeles at Urban Word NYC and Get Lit: Words Ignite. Hodge is also a founding member of a collaborative hip hop ensemble, The Getback. Her poems, editorials, interviews and prose have been featured in Newsweek, San Francisco Magazine, Believer Magazine, PBS, NPR, CNN, C-Span, and in two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry. She is also the author of the forthcoming book Dated Emcees (City Lights, 2016), a collection of poetry about urban hip-hop.^[4]

References