Tawanda Mulalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana. He is a poetry editor for Peripheries and an inaugural member of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program. At Harvard College, he served as a Ledecky Fellow for Harvard Magazine as well as the first Diversity and Inclusion Chair of The Harvard Advocate. He has attended or received scholarships from the Community of Writers, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and the Summer Program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems are published or forthcoming in Lana Turner, The Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. He mains Ken in Street Fighter.
“I intend to finish my first full-length poetry manuscript, provisionally titled Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die. The poems within it seem (to me) to be about the failure of intimacy and frequently ask what it means to be (or not be) seen by others and by oneself. They are written from, for and against: America, blackness, Sylvia Plath, prettiness, song, poetry, and mind.”