Mubanga Kalimamukwento

media release: A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome Mubanga Kalimamukwento for an event in celebration of her new release The Shipikisha Club. She will be joined in conversation with Ainehi Edoro. 

This is an in-person event at A Room of One's Own.

Kabwe, Zambia: Sali, a working mother of three, stands trial for the murder of her husband, Kasunga. The prosecutor claims Sali shot him after a heated fight in their bedroom. There are no witnesses. Sali pleads not guilty.

But her story does not begin with a gun. It begins fourteen years earlier—with her rebellion against the pressure to find a husband, her affair with a wealthy married man called Doc, and her discovery that she’s pregnant on the same day of Doc’s unexpected death.

To avoid the shame of being an unwed mother, Sali accepts Kasunga’s proposal, and finds herself suddenly thrust into the shipikisha club: her society’s expectations that it is a wife’s duty to endure. Over the years, Sali navigates her husband’s infidelities and alcohol-filled nights, their money troubles, and her postpartum depression in silence. Until the day she speaks her mind, and Kasunga puts a gun in her face.

The trial is a national scandal. Many are called to testify—the maid, Kasunga’s mother, and Ntashé, Sali's fifteen-year-old daughter. Even after Sali’s diary is dissected and laid bare for all to see, Sali calls no witnesses to her defense. With Kasunga gone, only Sali will ever know the truth. But is the truth enough?

Told through the rotating perspectives of Sali, Ntashé, and Sali’s mother Peggy, The Shipikisha Club is a riveting story of gender politics in Zambia and the world at large—a must-read for fans of Peace Adzo Medie, Abi Daré, and Tayari P. Jones.

Mubanga Kalimamukwento is the author of The Shipikisha Club (Dzanc, 2026), Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), Another Mother Does Not Come When Yours Dies (Wayfarer, 2025), unmarked graves (Tusculum, 2022), and The Mourning Bird (Jacana, 2019). Her work appears in adda, Overland, Isele, Kweli, Netflix, and elsewhere. She has edited for Shenandoah, the Water~Stone Review, Doek!, and Safundi, and mentors at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Mubanga founded Ubwali Literary Magazine. She is a PhD student in the department of Gender, Women and Sexualities Studies with a minor in Development Studies and Social Change at the University of Minnesota, where she researches Zambian married women who are long-term survivors of HIV.

Ainehi Edoro-Glines is a Nigerian literary scholar who studies African literature and digital culture. She is a Mellon Morgridge Assistant Professor of English and African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the founder and editor of Brittle Paper, a major news platform on African books and literary culture. Her research explores how stories, in novels and on social media, present new ways of thinking about the art and philosophy of worldmaking. Her first book Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in January 2026. and her work has appeared in top academic journals like English Literary History and PMLA, as well as in mainstream platforms like The Guardian, Africa is a Country, Lit Hub, BBC World News, and SABC.