My Bio

Gloria Mwaniga Minage Odary likes to think of herself as a flâneur, and a headstrong historian. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Memphis, and is fascinated by historical revisionism & the intersection between research and imagination.

Odary is a recipient of the 2024 Georgia Review Prose Prize, the 2024 Isele Nonfiction Prize, the 2021 African Land Policy Centre Story Prize, and a Miles Morland Writing Scholarship.

She has prose and poetry published in The Georgia Review, Isele, Lolwe, CRAFT and elsewhere. Her essay A Kenyan Woman’s Musings on Tea and the Empire is forthcoming from Transition.

Odary is currently revising a bunch of sad poems and a novel titled Birds of Paradise. She’s also working on a series of essays about Memphis music legends she grew up listening to.