Mbogo Ireri, shortlisted for the 2018 Writivism short story contest, is 38 years old and was born in Embu, Kenya. He lives in Nairobi with his wife and son (although currently he is away on a short job contract in Doha, Qatar). He wrote his first short story, “One False Move,” when he was 18…
Mali Kambandu, shortlisted for the 2018 Writivism Fiction Contest, lives in Lusaka, Zambia, with her husband and two children. Mali’s writing influences are Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, but her most cherished book is To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. While storytelling came early for her, she didn’t write for pleasure until after university at…
We are featuring new poems by Heather Hutcheson, a professor of English in Sacramento, California. She is the founding editor of the Cosumnes River Journal and curator of the ‘Our Life Stories’ conference held annually at Cosumnes River College. During the semester, she promotes a language exchange between day laborers and community college students in a parking…
Eleven-year-old Veronica died in labour. Her kinsmen said that starting her period earlier than the rest of us made her a woman. Her cervix had insisted otherwise. It’s not as if I was so surprised when they married her off. Everyone admired her supple skin, her baby face, her petite frame. But be careful when…
The fiction section features a new short story by Abu Amirah, who is a Mombasa-based emerging writer and a second-year student of Psychology. He was shortlisted for the Writivism 2016 short story prize and was mentored by Yewande Omotoso during the Writivism online mentoring program ( 2017). Having attended the Miles Morland Foundation writing workshop in…
September 18, 2017— Graywolf Press has announced the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, to be awarded for a first novel manuscript by an African author primarily residing in Africa. The prize will be judged by A. Igoni Barrett, author of the acclaimed novel Blackass, in conjunction with the Graywolf Editors. The submission period will run from October 1—October…
Limbe is a coastal resort city by the black, sandy beaches of the Atlantic in the Anglophone South West Region of Cameroon. It is also where Africa’s first million dollar novelist, Imbolo Mbue was born and raised. Her debut novel, “Behold the dreamers” is partly set there. Most of the flashback in her novel also goes there. Imbolo’s very moving reminiscences of places like Half Mile, Down Beach and Isokolo, resonated with me a lot because they are all places that I lived in or visited in Limbe while growing up. Yet, no matter how neatly she paints the portrait of that clean city in her novel, it is ironically a place that she left. It is also a city which her novel’s two main characters, Jende and Neni Jonga also leave behind.
A Casualty of Power (Weaver Press, 2016) reads something like a thriller, and it is as difficult to put down, while simultaneously exploring some of the fundamental issues bedevilling post-colonial Africa. The experiences that Hamoonga Moya, the Zambian protagonist, endures will resonate with many in the sub-region. Corruption in high places and the recolonization of…
Laure Gnagbé Blédou whose short story, “I Haven’t Returned”, was shortlisted in August 2016 for Writivism short story competition, is passionate, a woman, lover, mother, daughter, sister, cousin, friend, Africa-ddict, thirty-something, impatient, Ivorian, French, human, reader, speaker, writer, demanding, citizen, vegetarian, traveller, road-trip fan, learner, book-lover, bridge-lover, chocolate-lover, music enthusiast, sharer, feminist, old-school, new-school, journalist.…
We have just published a new short story, “A Certain Time Ago”, by Rumbi Munochiveyi, a Zimbabwean writer who is currently completing her B.S. in Mathematics at the Worcester State University, Massachusetts. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and four children. Ambuya died on a breezy, late August afternoon, twenty-five…
