Acker’s (she/her) multi-genre novels and short stories interrogate race, class, and gender, contrasting the societal expectations and self-determined identities of Black women and girls. Her writing exposes the “humor in systems that are inherently absurd,” she says, to grapple with racial power dynamics and "imagine new worlds without constraint.” Her short story collection Training School for Negro Girls was published by Feminist Press in 2018 and features a wide-ranging cast of characters who are confronted with the idea that respectability does not equal freedom. She’s currently working on a collection called Mothership, featuring stories about women’s relationships to motherhood, and A Very Special Episode, about four Black women on the set of a fake 1990s sitcom. Her work has received support from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Millay Colony for the Arts, Voices of Our Nations Arts, and the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, among others. Acker earned an MFA in creative writing from New Mexico State University and a BA in English from Howard University.
