Meet the author, her books, and her brand.

I like to think of my literary brand as presenting entertaining stories built not only to confront challenging questions but to answer those questions and then imagine the consequences in order to speculate upon what should happen next. The storyteller’s power is both in dreaming and elevating an audience to the answers they already knew were there and were either trying to achieve or avoid. My fiction is always in dialogue with something socially tangible.

My present work in development is titled The Viennese Tale of English Music, literary fiction that uses a historical lens to examine modern structural and physical violence. The Viennese Tale’ is also a Manichean Leitmotif, coined by Black Arts playwright Arthur Graham to define a literary device used to foment and propagate anti-Black and misogynic structural violence in literature.

I write using a device that I call SOSOADAE (based on my undergraduate research African Dramatic Form), which understands story as ritual space and intentional movement that is generally all of informative, entertaining, and transformative.

Central to SOSOADAE design is the ritual movement through a given condition, or problem, to its solution and afterlife (this is, defining the problem, solving the problem, and then developing the story beyond a problem’s solution) towards understanding the questions we should be asking.

I have presented on the topic of Manichean Leitmotif, with solutions, at the 2018 National Council for Black Studies Conference and have over years locally hosted a number of public writing groups, with emphasis on language and fiction as technology and the “author as genre.” I am a military veteran and neuro-divergent writer living in Arizona.

For inquiries, email nefertiti@sosoadae.com

Nefertiti Van der Riese