Anuwai Life creates accessibility to safe, socially inclusive communities, and provides resources, professional development, and civic engagement programs that support emerging artists, with and without disabilities, as they pursue careers across every art genre.
Anuwai Life is led today by Executive Director Kathya Alexander, an author, playwright, storyteller, and teaching artist whose work is rooted in Southern, historical, and contemporary African American culture.
Her debut novel, Keep A'Livin', was released by Aunt Lute Books in 2024, with its audiobook following in 2026 through the Jack Straw Writers Support Program and 4Culture. She won the Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for her play Black to My Roots: African American Tales from the Head and the Heart, and later the Binge Fringe Black Performers Award for its 25th-anniversary revival.
She is a member of the African American Writers Alliance, the Seattle Storytellers Guild, the Creative Advantage Arts Partners Roster, the Authors Guild, the National Storytellers Network, and Poets and Writers.
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the Civil Rights Movement — an era that continues to shape her writing today. She has built a career across self-publishing, mainstream publishing, festivals, retreats, and audiobook production, and leads Anuwai Life's growing coalition of literary and arts collaborators.
Anuwai Life was founded by Dr. Kennesha Bracely, Ed.D, whose own story of loss became the foundation the organization still stands on. After the death of her nineteen-year-old son, Dante', she rebuilt her life from the ground up and turned that experience into a lifelong commitment to helping others find resilience through art, community, and purpose.
Dr. Bracely has spent years building spaces where grief, disability, and hardship don't disqualify anyone from a creative career — they're the starting point for one. Her work has been featured on podcasts, in magazines, and in community organizing across Florida and beyond, and she continues to speak publicly on resilience, transformation, and building life after loss.
Anuwai Life carries her philosophy forward: that the people closest to hardship are often best equipped to build the systems that support others through it.
A year-long publishing initiative that challenges the disinformation campaigns surrounding Civil Rights organizations and Black Power movements — before and after the death of Martin Luther King, through today. In partnership with the African American Writers Alliance and Auntmama's Stage 3, the project will self-publish work by African American writers that corrects the historical record on organizations long mischaracterized as violent in their fight for justice.