Bethuel Muthee, Ema Tinje, and James Murua are the featured writers at “Nairobi | Maps of Exile” at the Coffee Casa, Nairobi on Thursday, February 27, 2020. The event will be moderated by Bhakti Shringarpure.
The new literary salon series “Nairobi | Maps of Exile” is a project organised by independent online magazine Warscapes and The Carrot Co, a collective of award winning African artists and other professions with an art focus. It examines questions of home, belonging, migration, and marginalization while exploring and redrawing the maps of African identity. The first edition of the salon featured Itoro Bassey, Abdul Adan, and Lutivini Majanja while the second had Kevin Mwachiro, Faith Oneya, and Saba El Lazim Elbasha.
The third edition, happening this Thursday evening, will have the following participants;
bethuel muthee (BM) is a poet living in Nairobi. He is a member of Maasai Mbili Collective and Naijographia. His work has been published in The Johannesburg Review of Books, Enkare Review, Jalada mag, and drr. BM was recognized by The Brittle Paper Award in the Creative Nonfiction/Memoir category for Naijographia which was described as “psychogeographical reading of Nairobi that touches on science, political environmental policies, death, the human body, and the city’s history of patriarchal violence, in English and Swahili.” He was also the series editor for the Down River Road Literary Journal which launched recently.
Ema Tinje is a romance writer. The stories that move her most are those that are written about love, loving, and everything in between. She is fascinated by how human beings connect and she *lives* to capture the complexities of relationships. She is in love with love. Nostalgia And Other Short Stories is her debut collection of short stories that explores relationships among modern couples living in a very cosmopolitan, yet still traditionally fueled, society. These stories present competing choices and other complications that color various journeys into intimacy. Ema Tinje is a pseudonym.
James Murua is a blogger, journalist, podcaster, and editor who has written for a variety of media outlets in a career spanning print, web, and TV. His online space www.writingafrica.com, (the one you are reading right now) focuses on literary news and reviews and is the number one blog on African literature today. The blog was nominated for “Best Creative Writing Blog” for the 2018 Bloggers Association of Kenya Awards. He was also announced as Best Writer “Theatre, Art and Culture” at Kenya’s Sanaa Theatre Awards and listed as one of the top men in digital in Kenya in 2018. His Podcast “The African Literary Podcast” was nominated for Podcast of the Year at the Bloggers Association of Kenya Awards 2019.
Bhakti Shringarpure is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut and founding editor of WARSCAPES magazine. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and has recently co-edited the anthology Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings. She is currently Fulbright Scholar 2019-2021 teaching at the University of Nairobi and researching literature and art coming out of refugee camps in Kenya.
The event on Thursday, February 27, starts at 6pm. You can get Facebook information about the event here.
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