Summer Literary Seminars

Fiction
FACULTY	SPECIAL GUESTS AND PANELISTS
Maxime Chernoff Billy Kahora Rachel Klayman Ed Pavlic Claudia Rankine Gary Shteyngart Binyavanga Wainaina	Parselelo Kantai Judy Kibinge Tony Mochama Boniface Mwangi Wambui Mwangi Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad, USSR, in 1972 and emigrated with his family to Queens, New York, at the age of seven. After spending time in Prague in the early 1990's, Shteyngart earned a degree in Politics at Oberlin College, where his senior thesis concerned the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Moldova, and Tajikistan. After graduation, he worked a series of jobs as a writer for non-profit organizations in New York, including the real-life Emma Lazarus Immigrant Absorption Society. Shteyngart's novels include The Russian Debutante's Handbook (2003) and Absurdistan (2006). Random House published his third novel, Super Sad True Love Story in July 2010. His other writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Granta, Travel and Leisure, and The New York Times. He lives in New York City.
Poetry
Claudia Rankine was born in Jamaica in 1963. She earned her B.A. in English from Williams College and her M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf 2004); PLOT (2001); The End of the Alphabet (1998); and Nothing in Nature is Private (1995), which received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. She is co-editor of American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century (Wesleyan University Press).
Mixed Genre
Maxine Chernoff is the author of six books of fiction and eleven books of poetry. Her most recent book of poems is The Turning (Apogee Press, 2008) and Some of her Friends that Year: New and Selected Stories (Coffee House Press, 2002), a Northern California Book Award finalist. Her previous book of stories, Signs of Devotion (Simon and Schuster), was a NYTBR Notable Book of 1993, as was her novel, American Heaven (Coffee House Press, 1996). Her translation with Paul Hoover of The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hoelderlin (Omnidawn Press, 2009), won the PEN USA Translation Award. An editor of the long-running literary journal, New American Writing, she is chair of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. She has read and discussed her poetry and fiction in Russia (at SLS), China, Germany, England, Scotland, Belgium, Brazil, Australia, and the Czech Republic.
Editor in Residence
Rachel Klayman is an Executive Editor at Crown, an imprint of Random House, where she acquires nonfiction in the areas of popular history, narrative nonfiction, memoir, American culture, politics, psychology, and neuroscience. She has worked in book publishing for more than twenty years. In 2004, several months before his speech at the Democratic National Convention, she approached then-state senator Barack Obama about reviving his out-of-print memoir, Dreams from My Father. She subsequently edited Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. Among the other books she has edited are Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire, winner of the 2003 National Book Award in nonfiction; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot; Holy War, Inc. by Peter Bergen; Baghdad Without a Map by Tony Horwitz; Look Me in the Eye by John Elder Robison; Deer Hunting with Jesus by Joe Bageant; Mandela's Way by Time magazine editor Rick Stengel; and The Billionaire’s Vinegar by Benjamin Wallace. One of the books she is editing at this time is one by the political commentator Rachel Maddow. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Writing Kenya Directors
Billy Kahora is Editor of Kwani?, Kenya’s foremost creative arts journal. He also writes fiction and recently completed an MS.c in Creative Writing with distinction at the University of Edinburgh as a Chevening Scholar in 2007. He is currently working on a novel based on his short story, ‘The Applications’ published in Kwani? 3. His extended feature, ‘The True Story of David Munyakei’ on Kenya’s biggest whistleblower has been developed into a non-fiction novella and is set for release by Kwani? in June 2009. He has been published in Vanity Fair, Mail and Guardian and the East African Standard and was highly commended for his short story, ‘Treadmill Love’ by the 2007 Caine Prize judges. He has recently edited, ‘Kenya Burning’, a visual narrative of the Kenya post-elections crisis published by the Go Down Arts Centre and Kwani to be published by the end of February 2009. He was also a co-judge for the Commonwealth Writers Africa Region in 2008. Billy studied and worked in South Africa for 8 years and in between worked as an editorial assistant for one of the largest African news sites, All Africa.com in Washington D.C. He also has a Bachelor of Journalism degree and post-graduate diploma in Media Studies from Rhodes University South Africa.
Ed Pavlic's most recent books are Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (UGA P, 2008) and Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE, 2006). His other books are Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon P, 2001) and Crossroads Modernism (U Minn P, 2002). His prizes include the Darwin Turner Award from African American Review and The American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize. He has had fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and The MacDowell Colony and has taught poetry at Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia and at the Kwani? Lit Fest in Nairobi and Lamu Town, Kenya. He lives with Stacey, Milan, Suncana, Mzée and I Am Pozzo in Athens, Georgia.
Writer in Residence
Binyavanga Wainaina is a Kenyan author, journalist and winner of the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing. He is the founding editor of Kwani?, a leading African literary magazine based in Kenya. He has written for The EastAfrican, National Geographic, The Sunday Times (South Africa), Granta, the New York Times and The Guardian (UK). Wainaina has taught at Union College and Williams College, and is currently the Director of the Chinua Achebe Center for African Literature and Languages at Bard College.
Guests, Lecturers and Panelists
Parselelo Kantai is is one of Africa's leading investigative journalists; an intellectual of commitment and talent - and a fiction writer. He has had a Reuters Fellowship for his nonfiction and was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing. He is presently completing an MFA in Creative writng from the University of London. He contributes to the Financial Times.
Judy Kibinge was born in Nairobi in 1967. Her family left for Washington DC in the USA in 1969, where they lived for the next five years. When she was seven, she won a major children’s writing competition in the USA. She studied at Kenya High School and Malvern Girls College in the UK, after which she proceeded to Art College in Birmingham, then Art College at Manchester Polytechnic where she graduated in Design for Communication Media. She worked at McCann Ericsson Kenya for eight years, three and a half of which were as Creative Director–the first black Creative Director in Kenya. She has been personally responsible for many award winning adverts. She quit McCann in October 1999 to pursue a career in film. In three years alone she produced numerous corporate documentaries, shot across the continent for Monsato, IPPF, Technoserve and others. She has also written the screenplay for and directed a short film for MNET entitled The Aftermath. Her film, Dangerous Affair, won the overall prize at the Zanzibar Film Festival in 2003. She has recently started a Multimedia Hotshop company called Seven. Judy is a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers, a coalition whose purpose is to use our writing skills to help save Kenya in this polarised time.
Tony ‘smitta’ Mochama is a poet and journalist who lives and works in Nairobi. A Law graduate, Tony is also a vodka connoisseur, gossip columnist extraordinaire, and has a collection of short stories coming out soon titled – ‘The ruins down in Africa’. He has also been called a ‘literary gangster’, from time to rhyme. His collection of poetry, ‘What if I am a literary gangster?’ was published by Brown Bear Insignia in 2007.
Wambui Mwangi was born in Nairobi and currently lives in Nairobi and Toronto. She attended Loreto Convent Valley Road and St. Mary’s School, Nairobi before graduating from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. She has post-graduate degrees from McGill University, Montreal, and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She has taught at Vassar College, New York and the University of Toronto. She has a passion for post-colonial theory and Kenyan political history. Her scholarly work, fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry and photography have been published in various journals worldwide. She is the Director of GenerationKenya and a member of Concerned Kenyan Writers.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor is the 2003 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing with her story Weight of Whispers from the Kwanini series. She was for some time the Executive Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival, where she organised a Literary Forum in 2004, attended by Baroness Nicholson. Yvonne was named ‘Woman of the Year’ by Eve Magazine in Kenya in 2004. She is now looking to increase the amount of time she can devote to writing.

Latest news: