Black Excellence: Anise Vance
Anise Vance is a writer from the African and Iranian diasporas. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Camden. As a Mitchell Scholar, he received an MPhil in Geography from Queen’s University Belfast. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and currently lives in North Carolina with his wife and two children.
In this post, Anise shares his experience of writing an emotionally draining novel that needed to be written, how his publishing team helped him, and more.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anise-vance-792a2239
Assistant Director, Community Safety @ City of Durham
I build public systems that treat people as neighbors. Over the past decade with the City of Durham, I’ve served as Chief Data Officer and then as Assistant Director of the Community Safety Department, where I helped launch HEART — one of the nation’s most closely watched alternative 911 response programs, responding to tens of thousands of calls with unarmed, care-first teams. Now I lead efforts on Durham’s new Strategic Framework to Make Homelessness Rare and Brief, a city-county initiative to drastically reduce homelessness through coordinated governance, real-time data, and rapid housing placement. My work sits at the intersection of data, institutional design, and narrative: earlier in my career I led research on racial equity, housing, and criminal justice at the Boston Foundation, and I hold degrees in geography (Queen’s University Belfast, as a Mitchell Scholar) and creative writing (MFA, Rutgers–Camden). I’m also the author of Hush Harbor, a novel longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Whether the medium is a dashboard, a department, or a book, the project is the same: proving that our public institutions can be instruments of dignity — and that they work better when they are.