The full list of confirmed participants and wider network for the Kenya convening.
Writers, scholars, artists and organizers from Kenya, Jamaica, Colombia, Trinidad & Tobago, and the diaspora in the U.S. and U.K. — confirmed for the Kenya convening.
Managing Editor of Ukombozi Review and Contributing Editor at ROAPE; links social-justice activism with African literature across two decades of organizing.
Pan-Africanist filmmaker working with Ukombozi Library and Vita Books, focused on indigenous knowledge, political economy, and liberatory politics.
Author of A House With No Angels; her fiction centers women, memory, migration, and diasporic belonging.
Executive Editor of Callaloo literary journal and Executive Director of the Callaloo Foundation.
W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell; National Book Critics Circle Award winner for House of Lords and Commons.
Founder and Director of the Maroon Indigenous Women Circle in Charles Town, Portland.
PhD student in Africana Studies at Cornell and host of The Malcolm Effect podcast on accessible political education.
Afro-Colombian poet exploring memory and diaspora; winner of the 2019 “Germán Vargas Cantillo” Poetry Prize.
Assistant Professor of Afro-Latin American cultural studies at Wake Forest University; founder of Himpar Editores.
Senior Research Fellow at CAD+SR and founding member of the Black Planetary Futures Collective.
Founder of the Artists’ Coalition of Trinidad & Tobago; work spans painting, theatre, film, and carnival arts.
Founder of WritingAfrica.com, the leading blog covering African literary news since 2013.
One of Kenya’s most influential musicians, blending Benga, Soukouss, and pop with social storytelling.
Co-Founder and Director of the NBO Film Festival; two decades shaping East Africa’s creative economy.
Afrofuturist and decolonial writer with Ukombozi Review, exploring ancestral cosmology and narrative sovereignty.
Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell; author of Nairobi Heat and Unbury Our Dead With Song.
Founder of the Ituĩka Literary Platform and Director of the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize.
PhD in African history; Program Director for AU Nairobi’s Contemporary Issues in Kenya and Africa program.
Director of Roots International, a leading talent-booking and event-curation agency in East Africa.
Renowned Swahili poet imprisoned for his political writing; later taught at SOAS and the University of Leipzig.
Kenyan writer and journalist.
Head of Africa for PEN International, leading movement-building for literature, linguistic rights, and writers at risk.
Participant list current as of publication and subject to change. Additional confirmations will be added as they're finalized.
From university visits and town halls to market conversations and the closing symposium — the complete day-by-day schedule for the Kenya convening is laid out in the program guide below.
