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2025 Classes
• 2025 Classes
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2025 Instructors
• 2025 Instructors
YVETTE LISA NDLOVU is a Zimbabwean sarungano. Her debut short story collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky) won the Cornell University 2023 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing, shortlisted for the Ursula Le Guin Prize for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Collection. Her novel manuscript-in-progress was selected by George R.R. Martin for the Worldbuilder Scholarship. She earned her BA at Cornell University and her MFA at UMass Amherst. She is the Newhouse Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Wellesley College and has taught at UMass Amherst, Clarion West online, and the Juniper Institute for Young Writers. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Fellowship for Black SFF writers. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, Clarion West, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute.
ADEDAYO AGARAU is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Cave Canem Fellow, 2022 Robert Hayden Scholarship fellow, and a recipient of the 2022 Stanley Awards for International Research at the University of Iowa. He obtained his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop ‘23 where he won the Deena Davidson Friedman Scholarship, John C. Shupe Scholarship and the 2023 Summer scholarship from The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. His poems have been featured in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Society of America, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbooks, Origin of Names (African Poetry Book Fund 2020), The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020), and For Boys Who Went, (Authorpedia 2016). Adedayo is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó: An Africanmagazine of literature and art.
FODAY MANNAH is from Sierra Leone and lives in Scotland where he works as a teacher. He studied English Language and Literature at Fourah Bay College and worked as a teacher and lecturer before moving to the UK. He holds an MSc in International Conflict and Cooperation from the University of Stirling and an MA with Distinction in Professional Writing from Falmouth University. His stories have been published in literary magazines including Doek, The Decolonial Passage and The Other Side of Hope, and have been shortlisted or longlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Bridport Short Story Prize, the Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize, the Brick Lane Short Story Prize and the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize. His novel, The Search for Othella Savage, winner of the 2022 Mo Siewcharran Prize will be published by Quercus in May 2025.
M. NEELIKA JAYAWARDANE is Professor of English at the State University of New York-Oswego, and a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She was born in Sri Lanka, raised in Zambia, and completed her university education in the US, where she currently works. Her research is centred on South Africa, and her scholarly publications focus on the nexus between written texts, visual art, photography, and the transnational / transhistorical implications of imperialism, ongoing forms of apartheid, discrimination, displacement, and migration on individuals and communities.
Jayawardane was a recipient of the 2018 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for a book project on Afrapix, a South African photographers’ agency that operated during the last decade of apartheid. She completed a critical writing residency at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2021, and received support from the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for an interdisciplinary project examining photography from Sri Lanka’s civil war period, titled, “This is not the correct history.” In 2023, she was a writing fellow at The Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) at the University of Johannesburg.
SIHLE NTULI is a poet, classicist and editor from Durban, South Africa. He received his MA in Classical Civilizations from Rhodes University, where he briefly lectured Classics at the University of the Free State and the University of Johannesburg. His writing has been supported by the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Studies in South Africa and the Centre for Stories in Australia through the JIAS Fellowship & Patricia Kailis Fellowship respectively. He also served as the editor-in-chief of South Africa’s oldest literary magazine New Contrast in 2023. He is a 2024 Best of the Net poetry winner and a Pushcart prize nominee. His poems have appeared in ADDA stories, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks; Rumblin (uHlanga 2020) and The Nation (River Glass Books 2023) alongside two full length collections Stranger (Aerial Publishing 2015) & Zabalaza Republic (Botsotso Publishing 2023).
A. K. HERMAN is a Caribbean poet and fiction writer, born in Scarborough, Tobago. Her debut collection, The Believers: Stories, is shortlisted for the 2025 OMC Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature
Growing up, A. K. heard fantastical stories about Tobago, its people, beliefs, and practices. Childhood tales and her time living in Brooklyn’s Little Caribbean- a vibrant neighborhood of immigrants and visitors from the Caribbean and Latin America-- inspires her writing, which also serves as historical documents that capture culture, belief and practices that have faded or are fading.
A. K.’s writing has appeared in Doek! Literary Magazine, Lolwe, The Water~Stone Review, Shenandoah Literary Journal and others. A. K. lives in New York and is working on a novel.
KASIMMA is an author from Igboland.