About

Ber Anena is a multi-genre writer, editor and teacher from Gulu, northern Uganda. She attended the MFA Writing program at Columbia University and is finalizing a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she has received the Vreeland Prize for Fiction and the Susan Atefat Peckham Prize for Poetry.

Anena’s debut poetry collection, A Nation in Labour, won the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa in 2018. Her works appear in or are forthcoming from Transition Magazine, Wasafiri, Prairie Schooner, The Atlantic, adda, Off Assignment, Black Warrior Review, and anthologized in New Daughters of Africa and the Caine Prize.

Her prose has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.