About Jameela

Jameela F. Dallis is a multidisciplinary writer, curator, art collector, and scholar based in Durham, NC.

With experience in UX writing, academia, marketing and professional communications, arts journalism, and nonprofit organizations, she brings fresh perspectives and critical insights to strategy, design, and copy.

Her first full-length poetry collection is Encounters for the Living and the Dead (River River Books, 2025).

Jameela received her Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 2016.

Creative work

Jameela’s first full-length poetry collection is Encounters for the Living and the Dead, from River River Books. She curated Material Encounters (Peel, Carrboro, March 2023) and juried Scaffold (Artspace, Raleigh, April 2023) and has served on regional curatorial and fellowship committees. Her publications include poems, interviews, arts journalism, and literary scholarship in Casserole Series Journal, Triangle Poetry Journal, The Fight and the Fiddle, Honey Literary, Our State, Walter, Indy Week, and elsewhere. She taught composition and literature university courses for a decade and has facilitated creative workshops—often poetry and art-centered—since 2009. See Work for more information about her writing, curation, and consulting rates.

Scholarship

Jameela has presented her scholarly work at numerous conferences and published chapters in Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison (Bloomsbury 2023), Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture (LSU, 2015), and Monsters and Monstrosity from the Fin de Siècle to the Millennium (McFarland, 2015). Her dissertation, “Haunted Narratives: The Afterlife of Gothic Aesthetics in Contemporary Transatlantic Women’s Fiction,” offers nuanced readings of Toni Morrison, Shani Mootoo, Angela Carter, and Shirley Jackson. Jameela argues that 18th- and 19th-century Gothic aesthetics haunt and complicate works by these women, where the Gothic may be devastating or transformative.

& more

She has been studying and reading tarot since 2001 and read regularly at Arcana from December 2015, when the bar opened, until 2023 in Durham, NC. These days, Jameela reads mostly for private businesses and individual clients. She is not seeing new clients at this time, but review her rates and policies here.