Description:

Join us for an evening with author Doreen Baingana, visiting artist of the Kaplan Humanities Institute.

Baingana will read from her work, followed by conversation with storyteller Wana Udobang. This event is co-presented by the Kaplan Humanities Institute, the Program of African Studies, and the Creative Writing Program.

Doreen Baingana is a Ugandan writer whose short story collection, Tropical Fish, won a Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and a Commonwealth Prize. Based in Entebbe, she has taught creative writing across Africa for two decades and has adapted her stories for the stage for performances in Uganda and Germany. She has an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park and worked at Voice of America radio for ten years before she became managing editor at Storymoja Africa, a Kenyan press, and later chairperson of FEMRITE, the Uganda Women Writers Association. Baingana is about to complete a novel-in-progress, Tongues of Fire, based on the life of a charismatic female rebel leader, Alice Lakwena. 

Wana Udobang is a writer, poet, performer, curator, and storyteller. She has three spoken word albums titled Dirty Laundry, In Memory of Forgetting, and Transcendence. Her work as a performer has taken her across Africa, Europe, and the U.S., along with working on commissions for Edinburgh International Festival, Bristol Festival, and Deutsches Museum. In 2021 she was awarded the International Writing Program residency at the University of Iowa. Wana runs The Comfort Food poetry workshop, and curates the archival project Culture Diaries and the multimedia poetry installation Dirty Laundry. She is the inaugural Ama Ata Aidoo Visiting Fellow of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern.