Black Boy Review’s first ever Guest Editor for 2026 is Frances Ogamba. For the first time, we will be opening a call for Nigerian fiction writers both at home and in the diaspora, and it’s a great opportunity to have Frances join us on this new journey. The call for submissions will open once a year every April in its starting period and likely to include a second call in the future. This year’s call opens on 22nd April until 7th June.
Reflecting on the kind of work she hopes to encounter as guest editor for the issue, Ogamba writes:
“Why stories?” Why do we tell them? Why do they matter?” I think of stories as acts of witness, attentive to both the material and the non-material. Storytelling is like turning the world over on its many sides and asking where it hurts. I want to read stories that explore these complexities, stories engrossed with their unique languaging, stories that break form and structure for good reason, stories that dwell in the banal and awkward, the uncomfortable and funny, the weird tales that make our bodies contort in unexpected horror. I want to encounter all the ways you are witnessing the world, the questions you are asking, and the tensions you refuse to resolve”
Frances Ogamba will work with the editor-in-chief, writers, and the multimedia designer to help shape what we will have as the 2026 issue.
Frances Ogamba is a 2025 Mercatus Center’s Don Lavoie Fellow at George Mason University, a 2024 Jacobson Scholar at the Hawkinson Foundation for Peace and Justice, and a 2024 Miles Morland Writing Scholar. She received the 2024 Walter H. Judd Travel fellowship, the 2024 COGS Research grant, and the 2022 College of Liberal Arts fellowship from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her awards include the 2022 Diana Woods Award in Creative Nonfiction, the 2020 Kalahari Short Story Competition, and the 2019 Koffi Addo Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She is a runner up for the 2024 Minnesota BIPOC Emerging Writer Award, and a finalist for the 2023 Locus Awards, 2019 Writivism Short Story Prize and 2019 Brittle Paper Awards for short fiction. Her novel-in-progress was longlisted for the 2024 First Pages Prize. Her work appears in Ambit, Ninth Letter, Channel, Chestnut Review, CRAFT, New Orleans Review, Lunch Ticket, Vestal Review, The Dark Magazine, Horror Library, Uncharted, Frivolous Comma, Jalada Africa, in The Best of World SF and elsewhere. She is a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and her short story was recently nominated for Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She co-founded the Idembeka Creative Writing Workshop and funds the Frances Ogamba Scholarship for African Writers at Ubwali Literary Magazine.
The 2026 issue will be published August/September, 2026.