© Author's Archive
Mubanga Kalimamukwento
Mubanga Kalimamukwento (1988) is a Zambian storyteller and criminal lawyer with an MFA from Hamline University, where she received the Writer of Color Merit Scholarship and the Deborah Keenan Poetry Scholarship. In 2024, she was the winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Angie Cruz, for her short story collection Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press). Her debut novel The Mourning Bird won the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award in 2019 and was listed among the 15 most notable debut books of 2019 by Brittle Paper. Mubanga was also the winner of the Kalemba Short Story Prize in 2019 for her short story “Inswa,” and the Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest in 2022 for her work unmarked graves. Her short fiction and poetry have been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAP) Book Prize, the Raz-Shumaker Book Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Nobrow Short Story Prize, and the Bristol Short Story Prize. Her work has also appeared in adda, Aster(ix), Overland, The Red Rock Review, The Killens Review of Arts and Letters, and on Netflix among others. Her second novel, Shipikisha, won the 2024 Dzanc Prize for Fiction.
When she’s not writing, Mubanga serves as Editor-in-chief for Ubwali Literary Magazine, fiction editor for Doek! and a Mentor at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She is the current Shenandoah BIPOC Editorial Fellow, a Tejumola Olaniyan Creative Writer-in-Residence Fellow at the Africa Institute, and a Mercatus Center Don Lavoie Fellow at George Mason University.
Mubanga currently lives in Minnesota.
