Candace G. Wiley

Candace Wiley is co-founding director of The Watering Hole, a nonprofit that creates Harlem Renaissance-style spaces in the contemporary South, and she often writes in the mode of Afrofuturism, covering topics from black aliens, to mutants, to mermaids. She is a Vermont Studio Center Fellow, Lighthouse Works Center Fellow, Fine Arts Work Center Fellow, Callaloo Fellow and former Fulbright Fellow to San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, a town that was founded by West Africans who had escaped from Cartagena slavery. (The people have their own language and customs that trace back to the Bantu and Kikongo in West Africa.) Her work has been featured in Best American Poetry 2015, Prairie Schooner, The Texas Review, and Jasper Magazine, among others. She has recently left a teaching position at Clemson University to begin the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Wiley is now living, writing, and helping direct The Watering Hole from her new home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

What If Tulsa: Story-Gaming App

In the What If Tulsa: Story-Gaming App, writer, and poet Candace G. Wiley imagines a virtual “Choose Your Own Adventure” game that allows users to experience history from multiple perspectives. Players can move through fifteen chapters of stories, each set in Tulsa, 1921. Players choose may choose between six characters of different races (Black, white, and Indigenous) and genders. The characters are driven by different motivations based upon their historical access to people, locations, resources, and knowledge. With twenty-four different potential outcomes, players learn that their characters’ access to resources shapes the direction of the narrative differently in each iteration.

What If Tulsa: Story-Gaming App will be available as a mobile app on September 30.