Mubanga Kalimamukwento presents Obligations to the Wounded

Obligations to the Wounded is the winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Angie Cruz. In formally adventurous stories rooted in Zambian literary tradition, Obligations to the Wounded explores the expectations and burdens of womanhood in Zambia and for Zambian women living abroad. The collection converses with global social problems through the depiction of games, social media feuds, letters, and folklore to illustrate how girls and women manage religious expectation, migration, loss of language, death, intimate partner violence, and racial discrimination. Although the women and girls inhabiting these pages are separated geographically and by life stage, their shared burdens, culture, and homeland inextricably link them together in struggle and triumph.

Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian attorney and writer. She is the winner of the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Contest, the 2019 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, and the 2019 Kalemba Short Story Prize. Her first novel, The Mourning Bird, was listed among the top fifteen debut books of 2019 by Brittle Paper. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in adda, Aster(ix), Overland, the Red Rock Review, Menelique, on Netflix, and elsewhere. When she’s not writing, Mubanga serves as fiction editor for Doek! and as mentor at the Minnesota Pr*son Writing Workshop.

Sheila O’Connor is the award-winning author of six novels. Her recent genre-bending book for adults, Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts and Fictions received the Minnesota Book Award, the Foreword Editor’s Choice Award, and Marshall Project’s Best Criminal Justice Books of the year, as well as others. Her other books include Where No Gods Came and Tokens of Grace. Additional awards for her books include theInternational Reading Award, Michigan Prize for Literary Fiction, and Midwest Booksellers Award among others. Sheila has been awarded fellowships from the Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, and Minnesota States Arts Boards. She has been a residency fellow at Yaddo, The Studios of Key West, Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Tyrone Guthrie Center, and elsewhere. She is a professor emerita in the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University, and currently teaches writing in the low-residency MFA at Converse University.

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