Neema Komba

Neema Komba is a poet and writer from Tanzania. She is the author of Mektildis Kapinga: a silent hero, and See Through the Complicated, a poetry collection. Her work entitled, “The Search for Magical Mbuji”, appeared in the creative non-fiction anthology, Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction.  Her short stories have been featured in Payback and Other Stories: An anthology for African and African Diaspora Short Stories, Adda Stories and Index on censorship. Her other works have also appeared in This is Africa and Vijana FM. She is the 2022 recipient of the Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholarship, and was nominated as a literature protégé for the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative in 2022. She is the 2014 winner of the Etisalat Prize for Literature in the Flash Fiction category. Her story, Let them eat fruit cake (published in Index on Censorship), was shortlisted for the 2019 Stack Awards for best original fiction. She co-founded La Poetista, a platform for poets and other performing artists to showcase their art and create a positive impact in the community through the arts. Through La Poetista, she coordinated the Woman Scream International Poetry and Arts Festival in Tanzania from 2013 to 2015, a movement to fight violence against women. She is also a steering committee member for the Ebrahim Hussein Poetry Prize and has served as a judge for Project Sawti Poetry Prize (Swahili) and Andika na Soma short story competition (Swahili). Currently, she is a doctoral student in Entrepreneurship at Hanken School of Economics.