Hello! I’m a writer from Gulu, Uganda, and the author of A Nation in Labour, a poetry collection that won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa in 2018. Until that historic year, poetry had always been a private undertaking—a means through which I made sense of life, sought clarity for uncertainties, and created a world more peaceful than the one I grew up in.
Over the years, I have ventured into fiction and creative non-fiction as well. My prose and poetry have been published or forthcoming in The Atlantic, adda, Off Assignment, Black Warrior Review, Brittle Paper, Isele, New Daughters of Africa, The Kalahari Review, among others. My short stories have been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2018) and longlisted for the Short Story Day Africa Prize (2017 & 2018). In 2023, my poems were shortlisted for the Isele Poetry Prize.
I hold a bachelor’s degree in mass communication and a master’s in human rights from Makerere University in Uganda. I graduated from the MFA Writing program at Columbia University in New York in 2021 and presently pursuing a Ph.D. in English (Creative Writing) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Apwoyo matek!
Anena