Nyamuteza

Jedidiah Mugarura is a storyteller descended from the people of Nkore. They are a creative writing workshop facilitator for Write by the Water at Lakeshore Arts in Etobicoke, Ontario, and a creative writing instructor at the University of Guelph. Mugarura's poems have appeared in Brittle Paper, Humber Literary Review, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, and the Ampersand Review, and their play, Tomorrow Never Came, was staged by the National Queer Theater in New York in 2025.

"Nyamuteza is an extraordinary collection along the lines of Song of Lawino but [also] original."--Chris Abani "As the transgressive love story unfolds, the dynamic relationship with the land becomes a vehicle for exploring tenderness. . . . It is clear that without the disruption of conventional sociopolitical structures, this affair might well not have taken place, and this is the cleverness of the plot--its engagement with a kind of fatalistic narrative. . . . [Nyamuteza] is a work of great complexity and beauty that will continue to reward close study in the years to come."--from the foreword by Kwame Dawes "I am quite astounded by the work--the writer's intellectual brilliance, capaciousness, the assured narrative sensibility even as we are carried by nuance and difference."--Aracelis Girmay "Jedidiah Mugarura's debut Nyamuteza brindles with song. This book length sequence puts forth a cosmology that recognizes the autonomies of the land, deep space, and the human between. Nyamuteza--constellated by eros, ritual, and remembering--heralds Mugarura as a new and prescient voice."--Donika Kelly, author of Bestiary and The Renunciations "Jedidiah Mugarura's Sillerman Prize-winning collection, Nyamuteza, opens with a brief lexicon that sets the stage for the remarkable sustained poetic gathering that follows. An incantatory text of great formal breadth and richness that melds a novel love song of queer desire with a futuristic ecopoetic and political critique, Mugarura's profound debut sings within the tradition while also offering a new vision for twenty-first century Ugandan and African poetry and poetics."--John Keene, author of Punks: New and Selected Poems, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry "Spellbinding and assured, Jedidiah Mugarura's poetic narrative reaches past land and sky, toward a universe of greater love and wonder. The breadth of this poem, grounded in historical and ancestral tellings, is distilled through metaphor as gracious to the soil as it is to the stardust. Nyamuteza gifts its people a wider canvas for dreaming."--Elizabeth Mudenyo, author of With Both Hands