Kelechi Ubozoh

Kelechi Ubozoh is a Nigerian-American writer and mental health advocate who blends the reality of trauma, race, and mental health into poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction. Originally from Brooklyn, Kelechi was the first undergraduate ever published in the New York Times. For nearly a decade, has worked in the California mental health system in the areas of research and advocacy, community engagement, stigma reduction, and peer support. Her story is featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, and CBS This Morning with Gayle King.

In 2019, she published her anthology with L.D. Green, We’ve Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health (North Atlantic Books & Penguin Random House) a collection of diverse stories of radical healing that considers the recent movement towards reform in the mental health field, including the consumer movement, peer support, and trauma‐informed care. We've Been Too Patient is now featured in curriculum at NYU and Boston University. Kelechi is also featured in the award-winning documentary, The S Word (now on Amazon Prime) which follows the lives of suicide attempt survivors to end the stigma and silence around suicide.

 Kelechi also co-hosts and co-curates the Bay Area reading series MoonDrop Productions with Cassandra Dallett. She has performed at the Berkeley Poetry Festival, Oakland’s Beast Crawl, San Francisco’s Litquake, and at Litcrawl with Cocoa Fly, an all-Black-women troupe. Her work has also appeared in Multiplicity, Endangered Species, Enduring Values, an anthology of works by San Francisco Bay Area writers and artists of color. In March of 2020, she joined Lyzette Wanzer’s AWP panel entitled, TRAUMA, TRESSES, & TRUTH: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narrative, which has now been signed to Chicago Review Press, with a tentative publication date of Fall 2022. She is currently working on a collection of poetry through memoir.  

Find her at https://kelechiubozoh.com/