April Zhu is a freelance journalist and writer whose work in Nairobi focused on the geography of violence and the Chinese diaspora in Kenya. She was a Senior Editor at Guernica Magazine and a 2024 Paulson-Frost Practitioner Fellow at Wellesley College, during which she taught a Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing. In 2023, she received the Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, the oldest journalism writing fellowship in the U.S. and, in 2020, as a Blakemore Freeman Foundation Fellow, studied Mandarin at the IUP Chinese Center at Tsinghua University. She is the producer of Until Everyone Is Free, a Sheng podcast on the life and work of Kenyan socialist and freedom fighter Pio Gama Pinto. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at the University of Iowa.

She has spoken at the 2024 Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters, the Doyle Seminar at Georgetown University, The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Florida Center for African Studies, and the African Studies Association.

She has designed a curriculum for foreigners learning Kenyan Kiswahili called Swahii, available as an online course.

She holds a B.A. in Environmental Studies and Studio Art from Wellesley College. Art here.

For full CV and other inquiries, get in touch at aprzhu@gmail.com.