Chinelo Onwualu

Chinelo Onwualu is a queer Nigerian writer, editor, and recovering journalist living in Toronto, Canada. 

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Her short stories have been featured in Slate.com, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, The Kalahari Review and Brittle Paper magazines, and several award-winning anthologies, including, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction, The Saga Anthology of Science Fiction 2020, 2021’s Best of World SF Vol.1., and New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction from People of Colour.​ She’s been nominated for the Locus Awards, the British Science Fiction Awards, the Nommo Awards for African Speculative Fiction, and the Short Story Day Africa Award. 

 

She teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She’s a co-host of Griots and Galaxies, a podcast about African Speculative fiction and the people who write it. She was one of the co-founders of Omenana, a magazine of African Speculative Fiction, and former co-editor of Anathema Magazine for queer writers of colour. She was also former chief spokesperson for the African Speculative Fiction Society. She attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2014 as the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship.

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To pay the bills, she's a communications consultant with over 10 years of experience crafting strategic communications for non-profits all over the world. Her clients have included the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID), ActionAid Nigeria, the BBC World Trust, and the University of Sussex's Institute for Development Studies. 

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Ex Marginalia, her collection of essays by authors of colour, is available now.