Jamila Osman

Writer: Creative Non-Fiction

Canada

Fall 2024

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Contact Info

Website: www.jamilaosman.com

BIOGRAPHY

Jamila Osman is a Somali writer, educator, and community organizer. She has taught creative writing from Portland to Palestine, from summer camps to juvenile detention facilities, and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow.

She received the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, the 2021 Black Warrior Review’s Flash Contest award, and The Bellingham Review’s 2022 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the author of the poetry chapbook A Girl is a Sovereign State (Akashic 2020).

PROJECT

Jamila Osman will be working on the completion of Memory Palace, a creative nonfiction project that charts a personal and national history of grief, two timelines that overlap, two threads of her life that must be unspooled as she interrogates how grief and memory are transmitted across geographies and between generations.

The narrative attempts to map what is unmappable about a place: contested notions of citizenship and belonging, contested versions of histories and archives. This project is an exploration of the parallels between losing a country, losing a language, and losing a family member.

The intricacies of that correlation teach us to think of loss not solely as disruption, but as aperture for filling through new connections to the self, others, and history. These points of rupture are not endings, but new beginnings.