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MEET THE CREATIVE FORCES BEHIND GLOBAL FUND FOR CHILDREN BOOKS

Olateju Omolodun

Coauthor, Extraordinary Girls
Coeditor, Xanadu: The Imaginary Place

Olateju Omolodun is assistant director of the Purdue University Black Cultural Center and provides executive leadership for the Performing Arts Ensembles, an arts education program. She served as community outreach coordinator and director of community education for Global Fund for Children Books (then known as Shakti for Children) from 1996 to 1998. While at the Global Fund for Children, she authored Extraordinary Girls with Maya Ajmera and Sarah Strunk, edited Xanadu: The Imaginary Place with Maya Ajmera, and collaborated with Kelly Swanson Turner on Creating Xanadu: A Resource Guide for Creating the Ideal World and Extraordinary Activities for Extraordinary Girls.

Olateju is a performer and director. Her creative works include Pomegranate: Narratives of Nigerian American Women, which she conceived, wrote, directed, and performed with an ensemble cast; Amai Zenzele, a one-woman show that she adapted from J. Nozipo Maraire’s novel Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter and performed; and everyBody's Business, a women’s community theater production that she codeveloped and performed. She was the recipient of the 1999 Wallace Ray Peppers Award in Performance of African/African-American Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Olateju received a bachelor’s degree in communication in 1996 and a master’s degree in performance studies in 2000, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.