They Are Us by Katama Mkangi (University of Georgia Press 2027); received 2024 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and 2025 National Endowment For the Arts Translation Fellowship
A science fiction critique of a corrupt, despotic, crony-capitalist society written by a former Kenyan political prisoner
First published in Swahili as Walenisi in 1995, They Are Us is an Africanfuturist take on Kenyan politics from real-life political prisoner Katama Mkangi.
It begins with a death sentence for Dzombo—but not in the traditional sense. Instead of firing squad or hanging, Dzombo is shoved into a rocket and blasted into the sky for “talking too much.” While Dzombo assumes that he will explode like all the other political prisoners sentenced to the same fate, he instead pilots the vessel of death through an asteroid belt of allegorical maladies, such as the “Rock of Ignorance,” and crash-lands on the utopian planet Walenisi.
Faced with remarkable technological advancement and egalitarian prosperity, Dzombo is convinced he has arrived in Heaven. His hosts, however, believe that Dzombo himself is an emissary from Heaven. What follows is a journey, farce, romance, cross-cultural encounter, and self-discovery.
Brain Flavour: A Lyric History of Swahili Hip Hop (No University Press 2026)
A road movie of a run through Tanzanian rap in the second person, a riff on the possible punctum(s) of 21st-century East African popular song, a telefoto lens on a local music industry, an exploded documentary study of a cultural anadiplosis, a love letter to the artists and musicians of Swahili Hip-Hop on the brink of our millennium and beyond.
A vitalising index of words as they lift and locate in songs, poems, conversations, processes and practices. An open-ended workbook where localised thinking interacts with dialogical learning all rhythmed by stories and alternative meanings. Translation comes alive in these pages.
—Kate Briggs
An original genre-blending book which weaves together memoir, cultural history, and literary translation. Brain Flavour is not only an education but a compelling and poetic voyage spanning the ‘lyric history’ of Swahili-language hip-hop in Tanzania, written with charm and hard-won authority. The book ultimately offers us a unique insight into the tangled intimacies between music, politics, language and translation.
—Anthony Anaxagorou
Who knows hip-hop who only (American) hip-hop knows? Brain Flavour—restless, wired, seeking—deprovincialises the form. Prins zigzags through Dar es Salaam, hangs out with local emcees and crews, chops and screws anthropology, sound studies and translation theory. Every page roils, dramatises the thrill of learning… and unlearning.
—Sukhdev Sandhu
We Are Still in the Fort by Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy (Vanderbilt University Press 2026)
“How refreshing to see one of the major Kiswahili poets of the nineteenth century being given a new breath of life and being ‘resurrected’ for the English reading public! By beautifully translating some of Muyaka’s poems, with introductory notes for each of the three sections, Richard Prins has done a great service to the better understanding of Muyaka’s verse and further popularization of Kiswahili poetry in general.”
— Abdilatif Abdalla, author of Voice of Agony
Chapbook
We May Eat Fruit (Ghostbird Press 2025), winner of 2025 Birdhouse Prize
We May Eat Fruit is a daring and lyrical exploration of power, language, and myth, weaving biblical echoes with contemporary voices to challenge authority and unravel the narratives that shape our world. Richard Prins crafts a mosaic of poetic fragments, legal texts, and cultural allusions, inviting readers into a thought-provoking conversation on justice, gender, and the weight of history. Bold, unsettling, and deeply resonant, this book pulses with urgency and wit, offering a revelatory reading experience that lingers long after the final page.
Anthologies
“Night Meal” by Lusajo Mwaikenda Israel in I Was Alive Here Once: Ghost Stories (Two Lines Press 2026)
“Because: An Etiology” in The Best American Essays 2024 (Mariner Press 2025)
“A Neighbor’s Pot” by Lusajo Mwaikenda Israel and chapter one of Walenisi by Katama Mkangi in No Edges: Swahili Stories (Two Lines Press 2023)