When you’re the Kimbilio Board Chair, a regular part of your job is answering the question “What is Kimbilio?” After all these years, you’d think I’d have my elevator pitch on lock, but I always end up hoping the questioner ignores how much wider my eyes get as they wander back and forth—a sure sign my brain is desperately searching for a quick sound bite. (“It’s a… “We’re a…” “Uh….). Maybe they read that as excitement. Kimbilio excites me.
And to be honest, I have plenty of descriptors—too many, in fact. I can mix-and-match them at will. Here’s a small sampling of categories:
Bland Officialese: a 501c3, a not-for-profit literary organization, a community of writers and scholars (blah, blah, blah—read the rest of that on our website homepage https://kimbiliofiction.com/)
Hyperbolic Adjectives: Wonderful! Outstanding! Miraculous! Amazing! Beyond belief!
Enchanting Abstraction: an absolute joy, God-sent, a warm hug, a safe haven (redundant or not, what Kimbilio actually means over in Kenya).
In interviews, I swirl these and many other phrases into one gumbo or another, and I hope I’ve communicated something meaningful. Eventually I get around to the real answer:
Kimbilio is people. It’s our Miraculous Staff, our God-sent Faculty, our Amazing Fellows. (See what I did there?).
For now, let’s focus on those Amazing Fellows. For eleven summers we’ve had the pleasure of welcoming over 200 Fellows to Kimbilio’s annual summer retreat. And every summer each of those Fellows gifts our community with a short reading from their work. I am always impressed, always moved to tears. You should be there! I really wish you could.
But since you can’t, I’m grateful to our friends at LEON Literary Review for providing this opportunity for a small sampling of our community to give you a glance behind the curtain. It’s just a taste of what Kimbilio really is, for me, at least: A labor of love. An absolute labor of love.
David Haynes
David Haynes is the author of eight books for adults and five books for younger readers. He is an emeritus professor of English at Southern Methodist University, where he directed the creative writing program for ten years. From 1996 through 2024 he taught regularly in MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Several of his short stories have been read and recorded for the National Public Radio series “Selected Shorts.” His most recently new novel is A STAR IN THE FACE OF THE SKY, and in 2023 he published a 30th anniversary edition of RIGHT BY MY SIDE as part of the Penguin Classic series. His new book is a collection, MARTHA’S DAUGHTER: A NOVELLA AND STORIES. David serves as Board Chair for Kimbilio, a community of writers and scholars committed to developing, empowering and sustaining fiction writers from the African diaspora and their stories.
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