Zoë Gadegbeku is the 2023 winner of the Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Prize for outstanding short fiction. Her story “Of Flowers and Sorrows,” published in v20n3 in the spring of 2023, was selected by our editors from short fiction published by Blackbird over the previous two-year period. This event is part of the Visiting Writers Series in partnership with VCU Libraries, VCU Department of English, and the M.F.A in Creative Writing.  

The Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Prize is sponsored by the family of Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto in her memory to honor her devotion to the art of writing fiction, to expand the audience for outstanding short stories, and to encourage literary excellence among writers early in their careers.

Zoë Gadegbeku is a Ghanaian writer living in Massachusetts. She received a bachelor’s degree in French from Georgetown University and an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College, where she worked in communications and taught first-year writing. Her work has appeared in Blackbird, Longreads, the Washington Post, Torch Literary Arts, and Electric Marronage, as well as the Best Small Fictions 2019 collection and the anthology Pan African Spaces: Essays on Black Transnationalism. She was a fellow at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and one of the winners of the 2020 City of Boston Mayor’s Poetry Program Contest. She works full time as a copy editor.

The event is free and open to all and will be held in person but will also be live streamed through Zoom.

For special accommodations, or to register offline, please contact Ryan Pander, event manager, rbpander@vcu.edu or 804-828-0593