Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer. She has been shortlisted twice for the Caine Prize for African Writing, and won the prize in 2015 for her story, “The Sack.” In 2014, she was chosen as one of the most promising African writers in the Africa39 anthology, a project of the Hay festival. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award in 2011. Her first published story, “Muzungu,” was selected for the Best American Short Stories 2009. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Believer, n+1, Callaloo, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Triple Canopy, and the anthology Reader, I Married Him. Her first book of literary criticism, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, was published by Harvard University Press in 2014. Her first novel, The Old Drift, will be published by Hogarth Press in 2018. She is an associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.