EXTRACTS
“TRANSIT” (Fiction)
drawing by Toyin Ojih-Odutola
“Even now (Thandi) wished it away—a reminder that she had once been weak. But of course it was too late. The moment had already pressed into the clay of her, become a part of the ceramics of who she was. By the time she boarded the plane, twelve hours later, it was a hard and permanent thing.”
“ISLANDHOOD” (Non-Fiction)
painting by Zilia Sanchez
“The ideal of islandhood belongs to a mode of individualism, yes, but not the noxious sort which takes the individual to be the final horizon, the last and most sovereign of laws. It belongs instead to a form of individualism that seeks simply to affirm our particular and indivisible actuality.”
“MEMORY” (Fiction)
painting by Elladj Lincy Deloumeaux
“He was recalling, now, an idea he’d put down…that the past was always swimming forward, transmitting DNA. Words that, at the time, had been little more than a pretty abstraction…Yet now they struck him as something that could also be personal: somewhere in the middle of audience queries, the past had stood and accounted for itself.”
PUBLICATIONS
FICTION:
“Memory”, Ploughshares, Summer 2024, Issue #160
Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize – Catapult, August 2021
“Transit” – VQR, Fall 2020, Issue 96.3
“Loyalty” – The Johannesburg Review of Books (Vol 4, Issue 10, December 2020)
NON-FICTION:
“Islandhood” – The Weganda Review, October 2024
“Mapping Time: A Coronavirus Diary” – Vox Populi, August 2020
Review: The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah – Meridian, October 2018
AWARDS, HONOURS & FELLOWSHIPS
Miles Morland Scholar, 2024 (Shortlisted)
Macdowell Fellow, 2024
Oxbelly Fellow, June 2023
The PEN/Dau Prize for Emerging Writers, 2021
Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction, University of Virginia, 2018-2021
INTERVIEWS
A Conversation with ‘Best Debut Short Stories 2021’ Author Khaddafina Mbabazi (Catapult)
Q&A with 7 Writers Featured in the PEN America Best Debut Short Stories Anthology of 2021 (Chill Subs)
image from Masterclass
MANUSCRIPT CONSULTATIONS
For manuscript consultations and other literary and editorial services, you can contact me here.