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The Classes
• The Classes
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The Instructors
• The Instructors
KIPROP KIMUTAI is a Kenyan writer and winner of the 2023 Graywolf African Fiction Prize for his manuscript, The Freedom of Birds, which is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2026. His fiction has appeared in No Tokens, the Johannesburg Review of Books, Kwani? Trust, the Evergreen Review and Jalada Africa. He is a 2023 Miles Morland scholar and was a finalist for the 2018 Gerald Kraak award.
SHEILA O’CONNOR is the award-winning author of six novels. Her recent genre-bending book for adults, Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts and Fictions, combines flash forms, archival documents, memoir, and historical research, to reconstruct the buried history of incarcerated girls. Honors for Evidence of V include the Minnesota Book Award, the Foreword Editor’s Choice Award, and Marshall Project’s Best Criminal Justice Books of the year, as well as others. Her other books are Where No Gods Came and Tokens of Grace, and her novels for readers of all ages include Until Tomorrow, Mr. Marsworth, Sparrow Road, and Keeping Safe the Stars. Additional awards for her books include the International Reading Award, Michigan Prize for Literary Fiction, and Midwest Booksellers Award among others. Her books have been included in Best Books of the Year by Booklist, VOYA, Book Page, Bank Street, Chicago Public Library, and Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers. Sheila has been awarded fellowships from the Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, and Minnesota States Arts Boards. She has been a residency fellow at Yaddo, The Studios of Key West, Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Tyrone Guthrie Center, and elsewhere. She is a professor emerita in the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University, and currently teaches writing in the low-residency MFA at Converse University.
FRANCES OGAMBA received the 2022 College of Liberal Arts fellowship, the Graduate Summer Support Fellowship, and the 2024 Walter H. Judd Travel fellowship from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She won the 2024 COGS Research grant, the 2022 Diana Woods Award in Creative Nonfiction, the 2020 Kalahari Short Story Competition, and the 2019 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She is a runner up for the 2024 Minnesota BIPOC Emerging Writer Award, and a finalist for the 2023 Locus Awards, 2019 Writivism Short Story Prize and 2019 Brittle Paper Awards for short fiction. Her work appears in Ambit, Ninth Letter, Chestnut Review, CRAFT, New Orleans Review, Lunch Ticket, Vestal Review, The Dark Magazine, Horror Library, Uncharted, Frivolous Comma, Jalada Africa, in The Best of World SF and elsewhere. She is a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and her short story was recently nominated for Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She co-founded the Idembeka Creative Writing Workshop and funds the Frances Ogamba Scholarship for African Writers at Ubwali Literary Magazine.
CHRISTOPHER J. LEE has held academic appointments at institutions in Africa, Asia, and North America. He most recently served as Professor of African History, World History, and African Literature at The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Harvard University. He has previously taught at Stanford, Harvard, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He has published eight books, including Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (2010, rev. 2nd edition 2019), Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (2014), Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (2015), A Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition (2017, rev. paperback 2019), Jet Lag (2017), and Kwame Anthony Appiah (2021). His most recent book is a collection of essays and travel memoir by Alex La Guma (1925-85) — the South African writer, activist, and second Secretary General of the Afro-Asian Writers Association — entitled Alex La Guma: The Exile Years, 1966-1985 (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2024), which is part of the Voices of Liberation Series published by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) of South Africa. He received his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University. He also has a certificate in documentary studies with a focus on social documentary photography from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University..
KELETSO MOPAI is a South African writer and qualified geologist. She studied for her master’s degree in creative writing at The University of Cape Town. Her debut collection of short stories titled If You Keep Digging, a social commentary on Post-Apartheid South Africa, was published in 2019 to critical acclaim. Keletso’s work is published internationally in numerous journals and nominated for awards. In 2020, Mail & Guardian named her as one of the Top 200 Young South Africans. She served as a judge for The 2024 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, as well as the 2022 and 2021 SA Writers College Short Story Contest. She was a writing fellow at The Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies in early 2024.
CHESWAYO MPHANZA was born in Lusaka, Zambia and raised in Chicago, Illinois. His work has been featured in the New England Review, the Paris Review, Hampden-Sydney Review, Boston Review, Lolwe, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Hurston/Wright Foundation, Callaloo, Cave Canem, and Columbia University. A finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, winner of the 2020 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest, and a Creative Capital 2022 awardee, his debut collection The Rinehart Frames (University of Nebraska Press), is the winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle and 2021 Foreword Indies award for poetry. He earned his MFA from Rutgers-Newark.
CHIOMA IWUNZE-IBIAM is a lecturer in Cornell University’s Creative Writing program. She teaches an intro to creative writing seminar and a first-year writing seminar. Her literary works have received several honors and recognition from the Commonwealth Short Story Writers’ Prize, the James McConkey Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Award, the David L. Picket ‘84 Summer Fellowship, the Cecilia Unaegbu Prize for Fiction, the Voice of America Award for flash fiction and others. A proud alumna of Cornell University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program ‘23 and Chimamanda Adichie’s Creative Writing Workshop, her works of literature have attracted the support of esteemed institutions like Fidelity bank, Goethe Institut, and FEMRITE. She is the founder of creativewritingnews.com, a non-profit educational platform she founded specifically to empower and nurture emerging writers. If you’d like to read some of her previous publications, scour the catalogs or forthcoming issues of Mukana Press Anthology 2023, Aster(ix) Journal, Ankara Press, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Flash Fiction Press, Fiction 365, Ebedi Review Anthology, and various others. Chioma is currently working on a novel that portrays the lives and struggles of a fractured immigrant family in a fictitious American town. Her Twitter handle is @ChiomaIwunze_ and her Facebook page is Chioma Iwunze-Ibiam.