Drawing on personal experience, Zambian proverbs, and her collection of stories Obligations to the Wounded, Storytelling as Intercession explores the power of narrative, reflects on the disintegration of language and personhood under the colonial project in Zambia, and considers how storytelling, particularly through mother tongues, can offer redemption, reclaim forgotten epistemologies, and preserve culture through memory.

Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian attorney, storyteller, and editor. She is the author of The Mourning Bird, unmarked graves, Obligations to the Wounded, Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies, and The Shipikisha Club. Her work has received the Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, the Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Prize, the Dzanc Prize for Fiction, the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Minnesota Book Award, and the CLMP Firecracker Award, and has been longlisted or shortlisted for several international prizes. Her short-form and editorial work appears in Netflix, Shenandoah, Water~Stone Review, Doek! Literary Magazine, and Safundi. She is the Founder of Ubwali Literary Magazine, Co-Founder of the Idembeka Creative Writing Workshop, and a PhD student in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Sponsored by the Political Science Department, Africana Studies Program, English Department, and Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies Program.

This event is free and open to the public.

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