Between the Walls and Empty Spaces

Christopher Okemwa is a literature lecturer at Kisii University, Kenya. He has a PhD in performance poetry from Moi University, Kenya. He is the founder and current director of Kistrech International Poetry festival in Kenya (www.kistrechpoetry.org). His novella, Sabina and the Mystery of the Ogre, won the Canadian Burt Award for African Literature in 2015. Its sequel, Sabina the Rain Girl (Nsemia Inc., 2019) was selected for the UN SDG 2 Zero Hunger reading list and is fast becoming a popular novella among young people in Africa. Okemwa is the editor of Musings during a Time of Pandemic: A World Anthology of poems on COVID-19 & I Can’t Breathe: A Poetic Anthology of Social Justice. He has written eight books of poetry and been translated to Armenian, Greek, Norwegian, Finnish, Hungarian, Arabic, Polish, Chinese, Nepalese, Turkish, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Dutch and Serbian. He has also translated four literary works of international poets from English to Swahili. He is the author of ten folktales of the Abagusii people of Kenya, three children’s storybooks, one play, two novels and four oral literature textbooks. Website: www.okemwa.co.ke