Simon Gikandi
Simon Gikandi is the Class of 1943 University Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Princeton University, where he is also affiliated with the Departments of Comparative Literature and African American Studies and the Program in African Studies.. Gikandi was elected second vice president of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in December 2016. He was the first vice-president of the MLA in 2018 and became the association’s president in 2019. He served as editor of PMLA, the official journal of the MLA, from 2011 to 2016.
Mukoma wa Ngugi
Mukoma Wa Ngugi is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University and the author of The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership, the novels Mrs. Shaw, Black Star Nairobi, Nairobi Heat, and two books of poetry, Logotherapy and Hurling Words at Consciousness. Unbury Our Dead With Song, a novel about competing Tizita musicians, was released from Cassava Republic Press in May of 2021.
Grace Musila
Prof. Grace A. Musila is an Associate Professor in the Department of African Literature at University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her teaching and research interest centers on; Anglophone African Literature; African Popular Culture; African Feminism and; biography. She took up an appointment as a writing consultant at WTIS Writing Center, taught in other prestigious institutions such as; University of Johannesburg, Stellenbosch University as a tutor and lecturer and later rose to the rank of an Associate Professor at the Department of African Literature at the University of Witwatersrand from 2018 to present.
Goretti Kyomuhendo
Goretti Kyomuhendo is one of Uganda’s leading novelists and founding director of the African Writers Trust. Her novels include The First Daughter (1996), Secrets No More (1999), which won the Uganda National Literary Award for Best Novel in the same year; and Waiting, published by The Feminist Press in New York, in 2007, and translated into Spanish in 2022, by Selva Canela Publishers. Her novella, Whispers from Vera was published in 2012. In 2014, she published the Essential Handbook for African Creative Writers. She has also published several children’s books and short stories, including Lost and Found, published in New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent edited by Margaret Busby (2019).
Goretti is a founding member of FEMRITE – Uganda Women Writers’ Association and Publishing House – and worked as its first Director for ten years (1997-2007).
Yvonne A. Owuor
YVONNE ADHIAMBO OWUOR was born in Kenya. She is the author of the novel Dust, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize. Winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, she has also received an Iowa Writers’ Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications, and she has been a TEDx Nairobi speaker and a Lannan Foundation resident. She lives in Nairobi, Kenya.
Yvonne won the 2003 Caine Prize for Weight of Whispers, and has published The Dragon Fly Sea (2019), as well as being one of the founders of the annual Nairobi based Macondo Literary Festival.