BIO

Panashe Chigumadzi is an award-winning writer, scholar and historian. She is an Assistant Professor of African History at Brandeis University and a visiting scholar at the University of Cape Town. Chigumadzi holds a doctorate from Harvard University’s Department of African and African American Studies, and a masters in African Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Chigumadzi is the author of These Bones Will Rise Again (2018) which was shortlisted for the 2019 Alan Paton Prize for Non-fiction. Her 2015 novel Sweet Medicine won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award. In 2020, she won the 2019 Gordon Parks Foundation Prize for her essay, "What don't you see when you look at me?" Her acclaimed first play, Song Unburied, will debut at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2026. Chigumadzi was the founding editor of Vanguard Magazine, a platform for black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa. A former columnist for The New York Times, and contributing editor of the Johannesburg Review of Books, her work has been featured in publications including The Guardian, The Washington Post, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Die Zieit, Chimurenga, The Sunday Times, City Press, Africa is A Country, and Transition. In the world of visual arts, she has contributed catalogue essays for institutions and artists such as the ZEITZ MOCCA Museum of Contemporary Art (Cape Town), the São Paulo Art Biennial, Sethembile Msezane, and Nolan Ozwald Dennis.  Chigumadzi has delivered lectures such as the 2024 Princeton Africa Lecture, 2023 ZAM Nelson Mandela Lecture at the Amsterdam International Theatre, and the 2015 Ruth First Lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand's Great Hall. She is currently an Open Society Foundation Fellow and has  previously held fellowships such as the Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and Fellow-in-Residence at Iowa University’s International Writers Program.

Photo: Rachel Corner