Yodassa Williams
Yodassa Williams is a queer Jamaican American writer, speaker, and award-winning performing storyteller. A powerful conjurer of Black Girl Magic, (70 percent Jedi, 30 percent Sith) Yoda blogs weekly about her writing for the 2020 Debutante Ball.
Yodassa is an alumna of the VONA/Voices Travel Writing program, the 2018 Fortify Writers Retreat, and a writing residency with Nefe Nof In October of 2019, Yodassa launched ‘Writers Emerging’ a four-day wilderness writing retreat for women of color and non-binary people of color, held at Fly Ranch, in partnership with Burning Man.
Yodassa has taught storytelling craft through Girls, Inc, Oakland Storytellers, and Writers Emerging. She moderated the ‘Fierce Femme’ panel at the 2019 Bay Area Book Festival and spoke to ‘Inclusivity at Burning Man’ at the 2018 and 2019 events.
The creator of the storytelling podcast ‘The Black Girl Magic Files’. Yodassa (Yoda) has performed her personal parables at locations which include: Doc’s Lab, The Oasis, and The Moth in San Francisco, The Shout, StorySlam, and HellaCon Festival in Oakland, and Berkeley Book Festival and The Monkey House in Berkeley. She has performed for The Black Woman is God in 2018, and from 2016 – 2019 at Burning Man’s Center Camp stage.
Her debut novel, The Goddess Twins, a YA fantasy, details the adventure of seventeen-year-old Caribbean American twins discovering they are goddesses when their mother goes missing. Published by SparkPress in May 2020, it is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
Yodassa grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and currently resides in the Bay Area.