Ladan Osman

Ladan Osman was born in Somalia. Osman earned a BA at Otterbein College and an MFA at the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. She is the author of Exiles of Eden (Coffee House, 2019), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a Whiting Award. Her first full-length collection, The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), won the Sillerman First Book Prize. Osman's chapbook, Ordinary Heaven, appears in Seven New Generation African Poets (Slapering Hol Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in Apogee, The Normal School, Prairie Schooner, Transition Magazine, and Waxwing. Osman has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and the Michener Center. She is a contributing editor to The Offing and lives in Chicago.