Mubanga’s Thoughts on #AccelerateAction
“It was only after my work had been written and released into the world that I confronted the question of whether it served as a form of advocacy—for the communities it portrayed, the injustices they endured, and the rare, hard-won triumphs they seized. This realization took me by surprise. In the act of writing, I am not proclaiming or persuading; in the writing process, I am simply asking questions of the things I am observing, concocting a story about how I think things have gone, sometimes how I hoped they had gone, other times, how I know they deteriorated, even without me as an audience. For my work, then, #AccelerateAction is a reminder to write about the causes I am most passionate about, the ones that form my hauntings.”
Mubanga is the author of Shipikisha: A Novel (Forthcoming from Dzanc Books, 2026) winner of the 2024 Dzanc Prize for Fiction, Obligations to the Wounded: Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) winner of the 2024 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and finalist for a 2025 Minnesota Book Award; Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies: Poems (Forthcoming from Wayfarer Books, 2025) finalist for the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) Book Prize; unmarked graves (Tusculum University Press, 2022) winner of the 2023 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Prize, and The Mourning Bird (Jacana, 2019) winner of the 2018/2019 Dinaane Debute Fiction Award. Her creative work has also appeared in adda, Aster(ix), Isele Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Kweli, Overland, on Netflix, and elsewhere. Her editorial work can be found or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, the Water~Stone Review, Doek! Literary Magazine and Safundi. She founded Ubwali Literary Magazine and co-founded the Idembeka Creative Writing Workshop. When she’s not writing or editing, Mubanga serves as a Mentor at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota (Twin-Cities), where she is also an Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC) Scholar. Her research centers on the autoethnographic study of the lives of Zambian married women who are long-term survivors of HIV.