How to write from dreams and the cure for writers’ block

Listen on Spotify

Watch the show

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.

Buy on Amazon.