My name, as written on my birth certificate, is Oluwafunmilayo Akinpelu. I wish to someday fully go by Funmi Omo Moji. I am a collaborative storyteller and intersectional writer. I would love to say integrated or interactive, but I am not quite there yet. I enjoy the thought of creating a story out of words, images, and sounds. I love the idea of mediums mingling and morphing, colliding chaotically yet creating mindful coherence. Pages full of words, then intercepted by photos, paintings, and sounds that translocate the reading experience; sounds that spur dance in the mind and feet overlayed with words that put motion to stop; images that strike a beat in the heart and could sit in the head for days because there are so many to words of context to latch onto them. These are the stuff I hope to create. Nothing about what I wish to write is experimental; intersectional literature happens everywhere – at parties where people dance to the beats of songs yet wait to catch on to lyrics which they scream at the top of their lungs, in conversations in which someone would fully effect a pause in order to pull up their phones and show their fellow discussants an image that corroborates their descriptions of a thing or person, even in books which some of us read to the sounds of background music. What I wish to do, though, is to accord intersectional creative writing the intentionality it deserves. I am a long way from doing this because I am still caught in the web of making words the primary form I use in my writing, but there is a will to practice intersectional writing. Hopefully, there will be a way.
Cultivating the practice of intentional intersectional writing has opened me up to the possibility of engaging in collaborative storytelling beyond the scope of what is practiced at the moment. I have found the exhibitionary space to be a good outlet for telling stories on a collaborative level. The extent to which collaboration can happen in storytelling is inexhaustive, and I hope to explore the possibilities in this mode of storytelling to my fullest ability.
Beyond creative writing, I am a grad student at the University of Alabama and I, despite having a knack for theory-heavy academic productions, like to marry my academic work with my varied mundane interests. My academic essays are reflective of all the aspects of life that interest me, from central Asian pop culture to Naija-centered social media and intellectual comedy. There is much more to be said but, hey, why not get to know me better by exploring the little works I have individually and collaboratively brought to life!
And yes, if you are so interested in following the trajectory of my slow but steady career development, you can find my academic CV here.