Angeline Peterson

South African writer Shubnum Khan is no stranger to the challenges that face an aspiring writer in today’s international publishing industry. As detailed in a Twitter thread that she shared in January 2024, Khan’s journey to secure a literary agent and six-figure deal for her second novel, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, involved funding her own international travel, freezing while presenting her work, and accepting encouragement from other writers to keep presenting her ideas.

What is the relationship between imagined and embodied knowledge of geographical space? In July of 2024, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Jill Jarvis over Zoom about her work in progress, Signs in the Desert: An Aesthetic Cartography of the Sahara. Jarvis defines the book project as an act of “aesthetic cartography” in which she argues that aesthetic works such as literature, art, and film fill in the knowledge gaps left behind by state-sponsored maps and colonial histories.

The African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently launched the Read Africa award program. The program gives libraries in the State of Wisconsin funds to enrich their collections with African books as well as offer programming to encourage a deeper understanding of African literature. Libraries interested in stocking their shelves with African fiction, poetry, memoirs, etc. are awarded as much as $1,000 dollars.