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Yvette Lisa Ndlovu

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano (storyteller). Her debut short story collection, Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky, Spring 2023), was selected for the 2021 UPK New Poetry & Prose Series. Her novel manuscript in progress was selected by George RR Martin’s team for the Worldbuilder Scholarship to attend Clarion West in 2022. She is pursuing her MFA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst where she teaches in the writing program. She has taught at Clarion West Writers Workshop online and earned her BA at Cornell University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She received the 2017 Cornell University George Harmon Coxe Award for Poetry selected by Sally Wen Mao, and was the 2020 fiction winner of Columbia Journal’s Womxn History Month Special Issue and the 2021 Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest winner selected by K-Ming Chang. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Workshop for Black SFF writers. Her work has been anthologized in African Risen (Tordotcom Publishing, 2022) and has appeared or is forthcoming in F&SF, Tor.com, Fantasy Magazine, Columbia Journal, Fiyah Literary Magazine, Mermaids Monthly, and Kweli Journal. She is currently at work on a novel.

Reclaiming a Traditional African Genre: The AfroSurrealism of Ngano

I fell in love with AfroSurrealism when I was drafting the stories for my forthcoming debut short story collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky, 2023). So many absurd things have happened in my life. I bought a loaf of bread for ten million dollars when hyperinflation hit my country, Zimbabwe, which means that I’ve been a penniless billionaire; I’m only twenty-six and have lived under two dictatorships.