Author

Keaona Gray-Outlaw is an innovative and non-conforming individual. Born and raised in Brooklyn, she has always been exposed to the art of storytelling in her community. Her first written piece was a short story in the fourth grade where she first dived into her fascination for the fictional world.

She has won the 2019 Colin Anderson Memorial Awards in SUNY Cortland for both Fiction and Creative nonfiction for her works “Out of the Box”, “Dancing on the Pavement” and “Brooklyn: We Go HARD”, receiving her first publications in the Crystallize Review. She also has publications through uInterview Magazine, Black Minds Publishing, The Cortland Writer, and an interview with pro-claimed author Melissa Studdard in Hoxie Gorge Review. She is a former student of the 2024 Summer Writers Workshop at Yale University. She was the very first recipient of the Nony Clark Milmoe Endowed Scholarship for Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences.

Inspired by authors such as Haruki Murakami, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and more, she’s always inventive and imaginative within her writing. Ultimately, she aims for readers to feel the exact feelings she feels when she writes these pieces.

She graduated from SUNY Cortland with a B.A. in Professional Writing. She currently attends the University of Washington receiving her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics.