Magogodi Makene

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Magogodi was born in Soweto, South Africa and came of age during the turbulent years marking the fall of apartheid. She was raised in Johannesburg, eventually making her way to New York, which she now also calls home.

Magogodi is currently completing a collection of inter-woven short stories exploring the inner lives and loves of ordinary South Africans making a life in a time and place most often inhospitable to their journeys.

In addition to fiction, Magogodi writes non-fiction and speaks widely. She holds graduate degrees from NYU, where she was a Reynolds Fellow for Social Entrepreneurship with me, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow and taught Creative Writing. Her work was awarded First Prize for the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics. In 2016, she won the David Relin Prize for Fiction.

I have known and watched Magogodi blossom into the compassionate being that she is. What strikes me most is her ability to be more curious and fundamentally see, hear, and feel things from the perspective of those who are othered. She models this way of being through her festival Love Is A Kind Of A Cure that has celebrated humanities of people seemingly different from her -- Indigenous people, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, Trans women -- yet inexorably connected to her journey to heal humanity.

I recently caught up with Magogodi to learn about how she got interested in this subject, and get her perspective on what needs to happen to break bias in our culture. Below are some highlights from our conversation.

~Anu

Participation on Humanity Rising

Day 92 - Breaking Binaries -- From Gender Rigid to Gender Expansive