Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
Faculty, Postgraduate Writers' Conference
Profile
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is the author of the novel House of Stone, winner of the 2019 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award for Fiction with a Sense of Place and the 2019 Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction, and listed for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize, the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize, and the 2020 Balcones Fiction Prize. Her second novel, Digging Stars, will be out in 2023 from W.W. Norton. Shadows, her short story collection, was published to critical acclaim in South Africa and awarded the 2014 Herman Charles Bosman Prize. Novuyo’s writing has been featured in numerous magazines and anthologies, most recently McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, edited by the Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Novuyo is an Assistant Professor at Emerson College in Boston, where she serves on the Writing, Literature and Publishing Faculty. She was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she taught graduate fiction. A native of Zimbabwe who has lived in South Africa and the USA, she holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Literary Arts Residency Award and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. She has taught community fiction workshops globally, including in Bali, Indonesia, and Awka, Nigeria, at Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Trust Creative Writing Workshop. She convenes the Kwantuthu Writers’ Workshop in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, an annual series of week-long workshops, community engagements, plays, and literature events. VCFA is thrilled to welcome her back for her second year of at the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference.