Yvette Ndlovu
Newhouse Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing
Author. Fields: Creative Writing, African Literature, Speculative Fiction, AfroSurrealism, Afrofuturism.
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano. Her debut short story collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky) won the Cornell University 2023 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing and was shortlisted for the Ursula Le Guin Prize for Fiction. Her novel manuscript-in-progress was selected by George R.R. Martin for the Worldbuilder Scholarship. She earned her BA at Cornell University and her MFA at UMass Amherst. 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 is the Newhouse Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Wellesley College and has taught at UMass Amherst, Clarion West online, and the Juniper Institute for Young Writers. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Fellowship for Black SFF writers. Her work has been anthologized in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021 and the NAACP-award nominated Africa Risen (Tor). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Columbia Journal, F&SF, Tor.com, Lightspeed, FANTASY Magazine, and Fiyah Literary Magazine for Black Speculative Fiction. She is currently at work on a novel.
She teaches fiction and poetry courses on Short Narrative, Speculative Fiction, Afrofuturism, AfroSurrealism, Novels-inVerse and more. Professional interests include editing and African literature.
Education
- B.A., Cornell University
- M.F.A., University of Massachusetts Amherst
Current and upcoming courses
Short Narrative
ENG203
A workshop in the writing of the short story; emphasis on class discussion of student writing, with reference to older and contemporary established examples of the genre.
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What is the relationship between art and activism when we live in a strange reality of worldwide pandemics, AI that can generate paintings in the style of da Vinci, and ongoing climate disaster? When reality is stranger than fiction, how can magical realism help us render this strange reality or Afrofuturism empower us to transform the present and transgress? In this creative writing workshop, we will experiment with unreality by tapping into storytelling with an undercurrent of magic and discovering how our voices can go beyond the page and change the world. We will read & write fiction where strange things happen: people fly, time collapses, the dead rise, & nature eschews the laws of physics etc. From NoViolet Bulawayo to Octavia Butler, the goal is to see how authors weave activism into their work and try it ourselves.