The Center for the Writing Arts at Northwestern University is proud to host a reading by Zakes Mda, the Visiting Writer in Residence for Fall Quarter 2010.

Zakes Mda is a South African writer, painter, filmmaker and music composer. He has published sixteen books, eight of which are novels and the rest collections of plays, poetry and a monograph on the theory and practice of theater-for-development. His works have been translated into 20 languages, including Catalan, Korean, Serbian, Norwegian and Italian. They have won a number of awards including the Amstel Playwright of the Year Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award and designation as an American Library Association Notable Book.

His novel Cion, set in southeast Ohio, was nominated for the NAACP Image Award. He commutes between the USA and South Africa, working as a professor of creative writing at Ohio University, as a beekeeper in the Eastern Cape, a dramaturge at the Market Theater, Johannesburg, and a director of the Southern African Multimedia AIDS Trust in Sophiatown, Johannesburg.