Though born in Bakau, The Gambia, ML Kejera was raised in Dakar, Dammam, and Tunis. He is currently based in Chicago. He speaks and reads English and French but can only understand Mandinka. He has forgotten Wolof. His work has previously been published, or is forthcoming, in Strange Horizons, adda, Cafe Irreal, The Outline, and The Nation. He was shortlisted for the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and nominated for the Caine Prize for African Writing. He is working on a novel about the fictional nation of The G. Pizza margherita is his favorite meal.
Though I don't put much stock in dreams, I—for the current moment, at the least—consider myself an irrealist writer, in the tradition of Chaims Nadir and Yoko Tawada. My eventual goal is to ameliorate my Mandinka to the point where I can write in N’Ko, the universal script for Mandé languages. The sublimity of the griots (oral historians and praise singers of West Africa), particularly Fa-Digi Sisòkò's take on the Epic of Sundiata, is to what I aspire.
