About
Malaika
Malaika Cheney-Coker was born in Nigeria where she spent her earliest years, along with time spent in the Philippines with her maternal relatives. She spent the remainder of her childhood in Sierra Leone. After immigrating to the United States, she earned a bachelor of arts degree in English and French from Lebanon Valley College and a master’s degree in international affairs and development from Clark Atlanta University. She then pursued two careers—in writing and in international development—with the latter taking her on world travels, and she later moved into social justice work in the United States and abroad. She is the founder and principal of the organizational creativity and social impact–focused firm, Ignited Word. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and two sons.
Will Write for Wonder
I've wanted to be a writer since I was four. As an adolescent, I second guessed this childhood fantasy and thought to make of myself a respectable adult; read, one that could earn a living and not be the quintessential starving artist. It was around the time I started my "real" career in international development and social change, that life's inevitable gut punches hit. I found that just as music purportedly soothes the savage beast, writing, no matter how unremarkable the output, can help heal the writer.
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Over time, I developed a complicated relationship with my writing career. I tended it at night like the bud of a dessert flower. It has yet to bloom, and I've learned that any rewards of a writing career can be paltry and ephemeral. But that's ok. Because now, I write for wonder. I write because writing (and reading) is a kind of everyday magic. When we find the right turn of phrase or observation of the human condition, or frame of story that previously hadn't been expressed in quite that way, we levitate a bit above the monotonous and mundane. I call it wonder, and that's why I write.
