Ubwali Literary Magazine has unveiled the mentors and protégés for the 2025 edition of the Ubwali Hope Prize, an initiative dedicated to nurturing and promoting Zambian literary talent.
This year, the program has expanded to include two mentorship pairs instead of one, underscoring the magazine’s commitment to supporting emerging voices in Zambian literature.
The 2025 protégés are:
- Mwinji Siame, shortlisted for her short story “Hometown Glory”, and
- Dacious Kaoma, shortlisted for his poem“When You Died”.
Guiding them through the six-month program are Chido Muchemwa, who will mentor in prose, and Chinụa Ezenwa-Ọhaeto, who will serve as the poetry mentor.
The mentorship runs virtually from July to December 2025, featuring one-on-one check-ins, craft discussions, and guidance on writing and submissions.
Prose
Mentor
Chido Muchemwa is a Zimbabwean writer currently living in Canada. She was a 2022 recipient of the Morland African Writing Scholarship. Her work has previously appeared in The Baltimore Review, Bacopa Literary Review, Canthius, Humber Literary Review, Tincture Journal, and Apogee. She has been shortlisted twice for the Short Story Day Africa Prize and placed 2nd in the Humber Literary Review’s 2020 Emerging Writers Fiction Contest. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wyoming.
Chido graduated with a Ph.D. in Information from the Faculty of Information and at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexuality Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto in 2023. Her research fields are critical archival studies, queer African studies, and postcolonial studies. Her dissertation, “Nation, Narrative and Archive: In Search of Queer Histories in Zimbabwe,” is a dissertation about the stories we tell about each other and how our archives shape what stories are possible. By tracing the myriad ways queer Zimbabweans engage in social negotiations of identity, and the stories they tell, Chido theorised how queer people are defining non-normative sexualities in Zimbabwe.
Protégé
Mwinji Siame is a culture and arts writer who also enjoys writing fiction. Her work has appeared in the Bosphorus Review, Art Düsseldorf, the Feminist Food Journal, and the Republic, amongst other places. She is also an aspiring visual artist. Read Mwinji’s shortlisted story here.
Poetry
Mentor
Chinua Ezenwa-Ọhaeto is an Igbo and Nigerian poet, fiction and nonfiction writer, and essayist, exploring the themes of culture, religion, lineage, ancestry, divination (dibia afa), post-colonialism, migration, and the complexities of existence.
He became a runner-up in the Sparks Poetry Competition, Memorial University, Canada, 2023. In 2018, he won the Castello di Duino Poesia Prize and the Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize (EOPP). In 2019, he won the Sevhage/Angus Poetry Prize. Winner of the Special ANMIG (National Association of the Mutilated and Invalids of War) prize: promotion of feelings of brotherhood between peoples, love of freedom, and defense of peace, organised by Centro Giovani e Poesia di Triuggio, Italy, 2022. In 2023, Ezenwa-Ọhaeto was shortlisted for the Writivism Poetry Prize and the Alpine Poetry Fellowship and was a runner-up in the 2024 African and African American Studies Program (AAASP) Best Graduate Paper Prize, hosted by the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His works have appeared in Isele Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, Oxford Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Frontier, Palette, The Common, Southword Magazine, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Mud Season Review, Notre Dame, Anmly, The Republic, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Ruminate, and elsewhere.
His full-length poetry collection, The Naming, will be out on December 1, 2025, with the African Poetry Book Fund via Nebraska Press. The Naming explores the movements, excesses, and extremes of existing as a postmodern individual, connecting these experiences to familial ancestry and lineage. The poems in this collection examine the various ways one remains tied to their ancestors, spanning eleven generations, by reimagining memories, history, childhood, homestead, kinship, migration, and the intersections of the past, present, and possible futures. Through this exploration, the collection seeks to rebuild a world that doesn’t merely replicate realities but reinvents, enshrines, and re-stories them.
Protégé
Dacious Kasoka is an economist, poet, writer, and machine learning engineer. A 2023 Best of the Net nominee, his writings have been published or are forthcoming in World Voices Magazine, Writers Space Africa Magazine, Agape Review, Arts Lounge Magazine, The Kalahari Review, Spillwords Press, OBBLT Review, Ubwali Literary Magazine, Pepper Coast Mag, News Diggers newspaper, The Shallow Tales Review and elsewhere. He lives and writes from Lusaka. Read Dacious’s shortlisted poem here.
This year, Mwanabibi Sikamo, a runner-up for the prize, will also attend a writing class facilitated by Caine Prize–winning author Makena Onjerika.
Sikamo is a Zambian storyteller, award-winning filmmaker, and Pushcart-nominated essayist whose works have appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Reviewand other literary journals.
Through the Hope Prize Mentorship Program, Ubwali Literary Magazine continues to provide a platform for emerging Zambian writers to grow their craft, access mentorship, and find greater visibility on the literary stage.
Bakare Oluwatobiloba
I write to educate, motivate and define history with literature. Just being me!
