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Nana Nkweti

Biography

Nana Nkweti

Nana Nkweti is a Caine Prize finalist and alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has garnered fellowships from MacDowell, Kimbilio, Ucross and the Wurlitzer Foundation, among others. She is a professor of English at the University of Alabama.

Nana Nkweti

Books by Nana Nkweti

by Nana Nkweti - Fiction, Short Stories

In her genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. In the Caine Prize finalist story “It Takes a Village, Some Say,” Nkweti skewers racial prejudice and the practice of international adoption, delivering a sly tale about a teenage girl who leverages her adoptive parents to fast-track her fortunes. In other stories, she vaults past realism, upending genre expectations in a satirical romp about a jaded PR professional trying to spin a zombie outbreak in West Africa. In between these two ends of the spectrum, there’s everything from an aspiring graphic novelist at a comic con to a murder investigation driven by statistics to a story organized by the changing hairstyles of the main character.