In this episode, I chat with Mubanga Kalimamukwento, attorney, editor, and author of Obligations to the Wounded.
Mubanga shares her cure for writers’ block, how she manages being a lawyer and creative writer, and how to write from dreams. We also go into an extensive conversation on Mubanga’s forthcoming short story collection, Obligations to the Wounded.
Show highlights
- Fun questions to get to know Mubanga (Find out if she prefers writing by hand to typing!)
- Mubanga reflects on the first time she felt pleased with her writing
- Mubanga’s journey from litigation to creative writing
- Starting a literary magazine and writing masterclass
- Getting creative ideas
- The cure for writers’ block
- Discussions on Obligations to the Wounded
- A word to her younger self
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About Mubanga Kalimamukwento
Mubanga is a Zambian attorney, editor and writer. She is the author of The Mourning Bird (Jacana), unmarked graves (Tusculum University Press) and Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press) and Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies (Wayfarer Books). She is also the winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (2024), selected by Angie Cruz; the Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest (2022), selected by Carmen Giménez; the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award (2019) & Kalemba Short Story Prize (2019).
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Overland, adda, Waxwing, Contemporary Verse 2, on Netflix and elsewhere. Her creative practice has received support from the Young African Leadership Initiative, the Hubert H. Humphrey (Fulbright) Fellowship, the Hawkinson Scholarship for Peace and Justice, the Africa Institute and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
She is the founding editor of Ubwali Literary Magazine, a current Miles Morland Scholar, and a PhD student an Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) scholar at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
About Obligations to the Wounded
In formally adventurous stories rooted in Zambian literary tradition, Obligations to the Wounded explores the expectations and burdens of womanhood in Zambia and for Zambian women living abroad. The collection converses with global social problems through the depiction of games, social media feuds, letters, and folklore to illustrate how girls and women manage religious expectation, migration, loss of language, death, intimate partner violence, and racial discrimination. Although the women and girls inhabiting these pages are separated geographically and by life stage, their shared burdens, culture, and homeland inextricably link them together in struggle and triumph.
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Artist’s links
Find out about Ubwali Literary Magazine
Find out about Ubwali Masterclass
Follow Mubanga on X