Mikael Awake (he/him) is a writer, professor, publisher, and organizer. His fiction has appeared in Callaloo, Witness, and McSweeney's Quarterly, while his reported essays and culture writing have appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, and New York Magazine. He collaborated with underground fashion designer Daniel “Dapper Dan” Day on Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem, a 2019 New York Times bestseller, and his narrative history of street basketball mecca Rucker Park, Playground Moves, is forthcoming from Pantheon. He is the founder of Nommo Books, an independent press, and serves as a local committee secretary for the Multinational Communist Party.