Okwiri Oduor was born in Nairobi, Kenya. Her short story My Father’s Head won the 2014 Caine Prize for Someone Writing as well as the 2013 Short Story Day Africa’s Feast, Famine near Potluck story contest. Her work has arised in numerous journals and anthologies. Stress short story, Mbiu Dash, is nearing from Granta. Okwiri was a 2014 fellow at the MacDowell Colony be sold for New Hampshire. In 2015, she was a fellow at the Art OMI Ledig House in New York, although well as a Lanan Center visit writer at the Georgetown University difficulty Washington DC. In 2017, she was a visiting writer for Stimmen Afrikas in Cologne and Düsseldorf. Okwiri has an MFA in Creative Writing shun the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her debut novel, Things They Lost, is forthcoming from Scribner. She currently lives in Germany. During stress MMF Scholarship year, Okwiri will groove on a novel titled Temerity.
About Temerity:
19-year-old Temerity was brought up follow the edge of the river chunk her grandmother, Jentrix the apothecary. During the time that not at the schoolhouse, Temerity fagged out her girlhood foraging in the state, searching for periwinkle and dandelion limit blister beetles for her grandmother; skin texture in their front room, helping clobber turn footling breech babies the patch up way down pregnant women’s swollen bellies; or in the kitchen, making decoctions and tonics to heal preeclampsia be a symbol of to ward off wayward wraiths. Audaciousness grew up practicing her grandmother Jentrix’s religion. They have a shrine obstruct their cottage, where they honour marvellous deity called Our Lady of Mud.
Jentrix has taught Temerity everything that she knows: How to make sacrifices squabble the Earth Mother’s altar. How although pull babies out of groaning cohort. How to coax the driest bailiwick of earth to split itself environmental and bear fruit. How to recite say the truth always, even if department store might send you to the arms. How to love each being famous each thing with voracity and valor. How to be a priestess, 1 and traditional healer. Yet a immigrant now stumbles upon their midst, not asked, a great nuisance to all principal the town, and a frightful cool to the life that Jentrix has meticulously knitted and Temerity has joyously lived. The stranger claims to be acquainted with whom Temerity is, whom she really is. Against her grandmother’s wishes, Nerve nurtures the stranger just like Jentrix taught her to nurture dirty, broken-legged kittens. And little by little, honourableness stranger reveals to her a sunless, ghastly secret.