Carey Baraka

Carey Baraka (born 1996) is a Kenyan writer of fiction and nonfiction. He was born in Kisumu, Kenya. He studied philosophy at the University of Nairobi. In 2024, he was announced as one of the winners of the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. Quotes Like the narrator, I went to Iowa to do this thing that was ostensibly a writing fellowship, but it wasn’t really a writing fellowship: It was a place for America to win Cold War battles by inviting foreign writers to fall in love with America. And so, in the story, the writers in this program aren’t in the U.S. as individuals — each one has been invited as a representative of a country. In this sense, nobody would care that Dusman [the narrator] is called Dusman. And he can say things like, “Oh, I have a pet rhino.” And he can tell people he’s from the land where Obama's real birth certificate is The only person who would not have performed would never have taken part in one of these programs in the first place. And if you really don't want to fit the Iowa writing model, you're not going to go to Iowa. But the moment you go there, you're saying yes to all the performance that comes with it. I think it's easier, at least for me, to write about heavier sociopolitical concerns from a remove. So the fact that the two main characters are from fairly nondescript countries means that the reader doesn't really have any preconceptions about them. If the narrator had been from Syria, like the character of Abbas — just from being from Syria means that all these things are attached to how the reader experiences them, and I wanted the main characters to be free of that. External links Category:Living people