Award-winning author Doreen Baingana to give public reading at SJU

Author and editor Doreen Baingana will give a public reading at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 17 in Room 346 (the Little Theater), Quadrangle Building, Saint John's University.

Baingana's collection of short stories, Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe (2005), won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs prize for short fiction as well as the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book in the African region. Additionally, she has won the Washington Independent Writers Award and is a two-time finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her stories and essays have appeared in various journals in America, the United Kingdom and Africa and several major east African newspapers.

Originally from Uganda, Baingana currently works as an editor for Storymoja, a new press in Nairobi, Kenya. She earned a law degree from Mekerere University in Kampala, Uganda, before completing her master's of fine arts in creative writing at the University of Maryland, where she also served as a writer-in-residence. She has also taught creative writing in the United States, Kenya and Uganda, and worked for Voice of America radio for 10 years.

Baingana is part of the Pilgrimages Project organized by the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers which sent 13 African writers to 13 cities to capture the 2010 World Cup moment and write a travelogue about the places they visited. DB was pleased to go to Hargesia in Somalia. Her visit to Minnesota, where so many of the Somali Diaspora now live, is part of this project.

This event, sponsored by the Literary Arts Institute (LAI) of the College of Saint Benedict, is free and open to the public.

The LAI is a unique organization, founded in 1997, to foster creative writing, publishing and interaction between students and writers. With its local and national partners, such as Graywolf Press, the LAI is able to bring writers and their work together with readers on campus, in Minnesota and beyond.