Short Bio:

Hope Wabuke is a Ugandan American poet, essayist, and critic. She is the author of the poetry collection The Body Family and the forthcoming memoir Please Don’t Kill My Black Son Please (Vintage Books 2025) and the chapbooks her, The Leaving, and Movement No.1: Trains.  Hope has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission. She is represented by Sarah Bowlin at Aevitas.

Long Bio:

Hope Wabuke is a Ugandan American poet, essayist, and critic. She is the author of the poetry collection The Body Family and the essay collection Please Don’t Kill My Black Son Please (forthcoming from Vintage Books) as well as the chapbooks her, The Leaving, and Movement No.1: Trains. 

Hope writes writes literary and cultural criticism for NPR. She has also published widely in various magazines, among them The Guardian, The Root, Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR, The Sun Literary Journal, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, The Daily Beast, Ms. Magazine online, Lit Hub, Ozy, Salon, Gawker, The Hairpin, Dame, The North American Review, Salamander Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Hope has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Commission, the National Book Critics Circle, The New York Times Foundation, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women Writers, Cave Canem, the Awesome Foundation, Yale University’s THREAD Writer’s Program, The Poetry Foundation, and the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA).

Hope is the Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is a former contributing editor for The Root, where she originated a column on African diasporic literature, and a founding board member and former Media & Communications Director for the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction. She is represented by Sarah Bowlin at Aevitas.