Photo credit: Sydney Chuka
Michelle Alipao Chikaonda (she/her/hers) is a nonfiction writer from Blantyre, Malawi. She holds a masters degree, with distinction, from the University of East Anglia’s School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, where she studied biography and creative nonfiction from 2022-2023.
She has won the 2014 Literary Award for Narrative Nonfiction of the Tucson Festival of Books, the 2015 Stephen J. Meringoff Award for Nonfiction of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers, and the 2015 Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Scholarship for writers of color from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In 2020 she was longlisted for the inaugural Toyin Falola Prize for emerging African writers, and in 2023 she was shortlisted for the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, recognizing outstanding talent from UK-resident writers who have not yet published a full-length book.
A Philadelphia resident for over 10 years, Michelle taught regularly with Blue Stoop, a hub for the Philadelphia literary community. She also served as a teaching assistant, student mentor and workshop instructor at Mighty Writers, a Philadelphia nonprofit teaching writing and critical thinking to children and teens, and was a contributing editor for nonfiction at Electric Literature from 2021-2023. In addition to being a 2019 resident at The Seventh Wave’s Rhinebeck Residency, she is a Voices of Our Nations [VONA] Workshop fellow, a Tin House Summer Workshop alumna, and has presented at several Association of Writing and Writing Programs [AWP] conferences.
She is currently published at Al Jazeera, The Globe and Mail, the Broad Street Review, Business Insider, and Africa is A Country, among others.