Meet Author Malaika Cheney-Coker!

About the Author:

Malaika Cheney-Coker was born in Nigeria where she spent her earliest years, along with time spent in the Philippines with her maternal relatives. She spent the remainder of her childhood in Sierra Leone. After immigrating to the United States, she earned a bachelor of arts degree in English and French from Lebanon Valley College and a master’s degree in international affairs and development from Clark Atlanta University. She then pursued two careers—in writing and in international development—with the latter taking her on world travels, and she later moved into social justice work in the United States and abroad. She is the founder and principal of the organizational creativity and social impact–focused firm, Ignited Word. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and two sons.

About Creature of Air and Still Water:

Seth’s psychiatrist has an easy answer for why Seth is oppressed by mood swings and recurring nightmares of a creature in a swamp. But the bleeding scratches on his neck will not be so easily explained away by the Bipolar II diagnosis. Upending his successful life in Atlanta, Seth seeks the answer in his native Sierra Leone. His arrival inadvertently triggers a latent grieving process in his cold mother, Evelyn, who has spent her life exerting her unyielding will over the practice both of memory and of forgetting. Despite courting a mystical experience, undergoing an exorcism, and seeking to excise the frustrations of his childhood by setting up a camp for underprivileged kids, the creature, and its attendant ills, claims more and more of his being. This leaves him to face the prospect of madness, violence and death. As he begins to realize that he will never be free from the creature, he takes the biggest risk of all – yielding to it.

Host or Publisher Virginia Highland Books