Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi was born and raised in Ibadan, Nigeria. A finalist for the 2009 PEN/Studzinski Award, her stories have been published in New Writing from Africa 2009, Ploughshares, and mentioned in The Best American Short Stories 2018. Her poetry has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, the Indiana Review and Wasafiri. She graduated from Barnard and UPenn with bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in computer science.

Omolola serves as Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science (CDU) in South Los Angeles. She is also Professor of Preventive and Social Medicine and Interim Vice President for Research at CDU, where she teaches and conducts research on using biomedical informatics to reduce health disparities. Biomedical informatics is a relatively new and exciting field that studies how to effectively acquire, store, communicate and transform biomedical data, information and knowledge to produce insights that can be acted upon to improve human health. Omolola is an elected Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. Her research examines how artificial intelligence (AI) and telehealth can be used to improve healthcare in medically underserved and under-resourced settings.

Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions, a collection of linked short stories, is her first book. It was selected as a New York Times Editors Choice (October 20, 2022), made The New Yorker’s list of “Best Books of 2022 So Far,” was a Los Angeles Public Library pick for “Best of 2022: Fiction,” and was the October 2022 selection for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club with Literati.