FRANCES OGAMBA

My name is Frances Ogamba, an essayist, editor, and a PhD student at the University of Missouri, Columbia. I completed my MFA in creative writing at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in May 2025. In my writing, I excavate past lives lived through different bodies, visit/revisit reincarnation and memory, and examine what memories we can carry across life cycles. My stories explore the gaps forced into my cultural/historical memory through different phases of colonial conquest. I am interested in this buried time: history, culture, genealogy, which returns through the human body rather than an official record. I am interested in bodies that become sources of archival retrieval, and blur spatial and temporal boundaries. I am also interested in internal and external migration: what it means to move across borders as an immigrant, and to write across language borders as a writer coming from hybrid cultures.

I am currently a fiction editor for Waxwing Magazine. Annually, I read entries for Idembeka creative writing workshop, a platform I co-founded which offers free writing classes for emerging writers who live and work on the African continent. I also fund the Frances Ogamba Scholarship for African Writers for Ubwali Magazine.

Instagram: @franceskaydee