Grinnell Alum Completes MFA at Iowa Writers Workshop, Celebrates Upcoming Novel

Grinnell College Posse alumna Jumi Bello completed her first novel, The Leaving, while pursing an MFA at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

The Leaving centers on a young African American woman living abroad whose unexpected pregnancy prompts her to confront a lifetime of mental illness and family trauma.

“I want to go where no one else will.”

“I want to go where no one else will,” Jumi says of her own time living and teaching abroad in Taiwan and China, which has influenced her writing. “I want to live on the edge and see what kind of person I become.”

Jumi says she aims to push boundaries with her work, writing in part to bring visibility to people living with mental illness.

While the upcoming volume is her first novel, Jumi previously published two collections of poetry as a student at Grinnell. Reflecting on her own Posse experience, she says college was difficult, but the support of her Posse mentor, Erin, helped her to never feel judged.

“I was a hard person to understand because I was not a good student, but I had a lot of promise,” Jumi says. She remembers that Erin recognized that in her.

Currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Nevada’s Black Mountain Institute, Jumi is now planning her next book to focus on mental illness, race and police brutality during the 1980s “War on Drugs.” She hopes to “illuminate the way” for other authors of color.

“I wake up and fight to show the marginalized that our stories matter,” Jumi says. “This world is ours, too.”