Uchechi Kalu was born in Abia State, Nigeria in 1978. In 1979, she immigrated to the United States with her family and grew up in Missouri, Texas and Massachusetts. As a writer, poet, teacher, performer and survivor of life, she has conducted workshops at universities, prisons, high schools, after school programs and with the San Francisco WritersCorps program.

She spent four years with the late June Jordan's Poetry for the People program, teaching at Berkeley High School, the Federal Correctional Institute at Dublin, and at UC Berkeley, where she studied African-American History and Creative Writing. She has performed at many venues and events throughout the Bay Area and the West Coast, including the Afro Solo Festival, the Radical Performance Fest, In the Street Theatre Festival, Intersection for the Arts, with Rhodessa Jones’ Medea Project and on KPFA Radio.

Her poems have appeared in several literary journals and anthologies and most recently in Revolutionary Voices (Alyson Books, 2000). Her book of poetry, Flowers Blooming Against A Bruised Grey Sky, will be published by Whit Press in 2004. She has been written about in Theatre Bay Area Magazine and SF State University Poetry Center. In 2002, she was the recipient of a Hedgebrook residency for women writers on Whidbey Island in Washington State.