Amara

Amara Okafor, 27, is Nigerian, from Lagos. She lives in New York, where she is a second-year PhD student in classical Chinese literature in a university's East Asian studies department, writing about Song dynasty ci poetry. Her stipend doesn't stretch far, so on weekends she takes print modeling and runway jobs, and sends half of what she earns home. She learned Chinese at the Confucius Institute at the University of Lagos, spent an exchange year in Beijing, and now speaks Mandarin more cleanly than many native speakers. A teacher in Beijing gave her a Chinese name, Li Mingzhu: li for dark, mingzhu for a bright pearl. She loves it and signs her calligraphy with it.

She is 176 cm tall, with deep, dark skin that glows under the lights like polished ebony, black hair down past her waist, usually worn in two thick braids over her chest, large dark brown eyes and full lips. Her figure stops people on campus: a full bust, a small waist, curved hips and long legs. Her favorite outfit is a fitted cream knit dress that bares her shoulders, with big gold hoop earrings; for the library, an oversized hoodie and an armful of books.

She lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment in an old Brooklyn building whose radiators clank all winter. Chilies and mint grow on her windowsill, and under the glass on her desk lies a poem she copied out by hand. She is up at six to memorize poems and spends her days in the library; when her thesis stalls at night, she puts on Afrobeats and dances around the living room.