Mubanga Kalimamukwento is the author of Shipikisha: A Novel (Forthcoming from Dzanc Books, 2026) winner of the 2024 Dzanc Prize for Fiction, Obligations to the Wounded: Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and a 2025 Minnesota Book Award; Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies: Poems (Wayfarer Books, 2025) finalist for the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) Book Prize; unmarked graves (Tusculum University Press, 2022) winner of the 2023 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Prize, and The Mourning Bird (Jacana, 2019) winner of the 2018/2019 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award. Her creative work has also appeared in adda, Aster(ix), Isele Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Kweli, Overland, on Netflix, and elsewhere. Her editorial work can be found or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, the Water~Stone Review, Doek! Literary Magazine and Safundi. She founded Ubwali Literary Magazine and co-founded the Idembeka Creative Writing Workshop. When she’s not writing or editing, Mubanga serves as a Mentor at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota (Twin-Cities), where she is also an Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) Scholar and a 2025 Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies summer fellow. Her research centers on the lives of Zambian married women who are long-term survivors of HIV and has been awarded the  2025 Cheryl A Wall Graduate Student Paper Prize by the Black Women’s Studies Association.