P. Djèlí Clark

P. Djèlí Clark is the pen name of Phenderson Djèlí Clark, an American writer of speculative fiction and a historian who teaches at the University of Connecticut. Born in Queens, New York, he was raised largely in Houston, Texas, and spent formative early years in Trinidad and Tobago, his parents' homeland.

He holds a doctorate in history from Stony Brook University, where his research focused on emancipation and abolition, and he chose the pen name to keep his fiction apart from his academic work; "Djèlí" refers to the griots, the West African storytellers and historians.

His fiction often blends history with the supernatural.

A Dead Djinn in Cairo, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 and A Master of Djinn follow the Ministry of Alchemy in an alternate Egypt where djinn and other supernatural beings live alongside humans, and Ring Shout is an alternate-history southern gothic novella that pits Black monster hunters against the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Georgia.

Ring Shout won the Nebula, Locus and British Fantasy Awards, and A Master of Djinn won the Nebula and Locus Awards. He is also a founding member of FIYAH Literary Magazine.