Biography:
Early Life and Education–
For the first ten years of her life, Chinelo Okparanta was raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. At the age of ten, she moved to America with her family and continued her education there. She was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, and in an interview on religion from The Iowa Review confirmed that while she doesn’t practice as a Jehovah’s Witness anymore, she is still devoted to Christianity. The theme of religion, especially Christianity, is something very prominent and important in many of her writings.
Okparanta received her Bachelor’s Degree from the Pennsylvania State University, her Master of Arts Degree from Rutgers University, and Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop.
Literary Career–
Okparanta has had a bountiful career in short story and essay writing, as well as being included in anthologies and writing a novel. Her short stories have been published in magazines such as “Tumors and Butterflies” and “Grace” in The Southern Review, “America” and “Runs Girl” in GRANTA, “Story, Story!” in Conjunctions, and “Designs” in The Iowa Review. Her essays were similarly published, such as “My African Memory Lane” in Metro (UK) and “Notes from Uzbekistan” in GRANTA Online. She has been featured in anthologies such as All About Skin: Short Fiction by Women of Color and The Gonjon Pin and Other Stories.
She compiled ten of her most famous published short stories into a novel collection called Happiness, Like Water: Stories, published in 2013. 
Two years later, in 2015, Okparanta published her first novel, Under the Udala Tree. The novel takes place in Nigeria during the Nigerian Civil War — also known as the Biafran War — in 1968. The story follows a young girl named Ijeoma as she comes of age during the civil war. Sent away from the violence to be a maid in someone’s house, she meets another displaced girl named Amina. The two of them slowly fall for each other as Ijeoma discovers her sexual attraction to women. The book follows the intricacies and complications of Ijeoma’s same-sex attraction as she goes about life in Nigeria. Famous author Edwidge Danticat reviews, “Demands not to be read, but felt”.
Awards and Accolades-
Chinelo Okparanta is a winner of a 2014 Lambda Literary Award and a 2014 O. Henry Prize for her short story collection Happiness, Like Water: Stories. Her novel Under the Udala Trees has received a 2016 Lambda Literary Award , the 2016 Jessie Redmon Fauset Book Award in Fiction, and the 2016 Inaugural Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from the Publishing Triangle. Other honors for her novel include a finalist selection for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award, a 2017 Amelia Bloomer Project Selection (of the American Library Association), a nomination for the 2016 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award, and a nomination for the 2016 NAACP Image Award in Fiction.
Present and Future-
She is currently working as an Associated Professor of English & Creative Writing (Fiction) and Margaret Hollinshead Ley Professor in Poetry & Creative Writing at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
The future is a bit up in the air for Okparanta. In a 2017 interview with OZY Author Sarah Ládípọ̀ Manyika, she admitted to working on two books but was reluctant to divulge details. Until more news of future books or writings is released from Okparanta, we can only wait patiently for her wonderful words.
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Chinelo Okparanta 