Cheswayo Mphanza was born in Lusaka, Zambia and raised in Chicago, Illinois. His work has been featured in the New England Review, the Paris Review, Hampden-Sydney Review, Boston Review, Lolwe, and elsewhere.
A finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, a recipient of the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers, winner of the 2020 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest, and a Creative Capital 2022 awardee, his debut collection The Rinehart Frames (University of Nebraska Press), is the winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle and 2021 Foreword Indies award for poetry. He earned his MFA from Rutgers-Newark.
