Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
Assistant Professor of Creative Writing
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is Kalanga (who occupy land in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa) and Ndebele (Zimbabwe and South Africa). Her novel Digging Stars (W. W. Norton, USA 2023) was a National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selection, which “aims to deepen readers’ understanding of science and technology with a focus on work that highlights the diversity in scientific writing” and “serves as a catalyst to create discourse, understanding, and engagement with science for communities across the country.” Her novel House of Stone (Atlantic Books, UK 2018; W. W. Norton, USA 2019) won the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the 2019 Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction, and was listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Balcones Fiction Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. Her novella-and-short story collection, Shadows (Kwela Books, South Africa 2013) won the 2014 Herman Bosman Prize for Literature and was listed for the Etisalat Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Tshuma holds a B.S. in Economics & Finance from the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa and a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Houston, Texas. She has lectured on her work, including at the University of Oxford, the Baylor College of Medicine, Vassar College, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Nordic Africa Institute. Her short fiction and essays have been published in numerous anthologies globally, including Ploughshares, Kwani, McSweeney’s, British Library Publishing, New Daughters of Africa and The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. Tshuma also serves as a reviewer and editor, having helped pioneer publications such as The Bare Life Review (2017-2021), the only literary journal devoted entirely to work by immigrant and refugee writers and whose legacy continues in the form of the annual Bare Life Review Grants for in-progress collections of fiction or poetry. A recipient of honors including a Bellagio Center Residency and a Lannan Foundation Fiction Fellowship, Tshuma has taught fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Emerson College, where she was a Faculty Director of the James Baldwin Writers’ Colony summer program, which takes place in the Netherlands, London, and Paris. She teaches writing and community-led workshops globally.