First-year MFA student wins Georgia Prose Prize

Gloria Mwaniga Odary won the 2024 Georgia Reivew Prose Prize. Her story “Henna is Just Roots” was selected by judge Danielle Evans.

Of Odary’s fiction, Evans wrote:

“‘Henna is Just Roots’ is gorgeous and haunting work, both a vibrant, giddy encapsulation of girlhood and childhood friendship and an account of atrocity and the trauma it leaves in its wake. The author’s accomplished sense of what to leave off of the page underscores what has been lost and how difficult it is to look directly at it, giving its characters what grace it can without losing sight of the weight of its subject matter.”

Gloria Mwaniga Odary is a writer and educator from Kenya currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Memphis. Her writing has won the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship and the African Land Policy Centre Story Prize, and she was longlisted for the 2024 Isele Nonfiction Prize and the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Mukana Press, Isele Magazine, The Johannesburg Review of Books, The White Review, The Writivism Anthology, and elsewhere. She has published book reviews and author interviews in The East African and Daily Nation newspapers. Mwaniga has also written children’s books, school textbooks, and business feature stories. Her novel-in-progress is an adventure tale that follows a young female drifter growing up in small towns across Kenya.