Judith Namala Book Launch with Serubiri Moses, John Keene, and Ladan Osman

Join us on Friday, May 22 at 7pm to celebrate the publication of Judith Namala: A Novella. Its release marks writer and curator Serubiri Moses’s fiction debut and the launch of a new CARA publication series, Practice. Following a reading, Moses will be joined by writers John Keene and Ladan Osman for a conversation about the novella and experimentation across genres.

Judith Namala is an experiment in adaptation, storytelling, and translation as fictocriticism. Set in Uganda between the late 1970s and early 2000s, the book follows the domestic dramas of Judith Namala, a Black maid, and Esther Nambi, her Black madam.

Drawing on art, film, oral tradition, folklore, reportage, and lyrics from a Luganda popular music songbook, Moses spins a story of housework and labor that reaches across forty years of Ugandan history. Unfolding in short vignettes, Moses’s innovative prose attends to the silences and opacities between two characters whose tense relationship is defined by class and social hierarchy. Hovering at the surface of these quiet scenes of servitude, the narrator offers an enigmatic model of interiority—grasped only in passing, where psychic geographies confront, and sometimes, surprisingly, mirror one another. Judith Namala is an intimate, domestic portrait that embraces the poetics of metaphor.

Judith Namala is the first title in CARA’s publication series, Practice. Each season features newly commissioned texts, writing in translation, critical conversations, and rigorous and experimental approaches to research and inquiry that model new ways of thinking and making beyond disciplinary frameworks and genres. The series supports practices that challenge dominant narratives, expand historical records, and foreground process, care, and embodied forms of knowing. In its inaugural year Practice invites writers to engage with histories of material and visual culture to animate their potential for addressing the urgencies and cultural shifts of the present. Forthcoming titles include The Intimate Cinemas of Arlette Pacquit: Conversations between Arlette Pacquit and Nathanaël, translated from the French/Kreyol by Nathanaël, and Subject to Justice by Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz.

Serubiri Moses is a Ugandan curator and writer living in New York City. He is the author of two poetry books, THE MOON IS READING US A BOOK and You Who Suffer Because You Love, Love Still More (pântano books, 2023 and 2025). His fiction has appeared in Lolwe and Ursula. Moses is a contributing editor at e-flux journal, and teaches at Hunter College and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Judith Namala: A Novella is his first novel.

John Keene is the author, co-author, co-editor, and translator of a handful of books, including Essex Hemphill's Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems (2025), co-edited with Robert F. Reid-Pharr; Punks: New & Selected Poems (2021), which received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the 2022 Thom Gunn Award and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry; and Counternarratives: Stories and Novellas (2015) which received the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize, an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. He has translated poetry and fiction by an array of writers, including Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer, which Pushkin Press published in a revised edition in 2025. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is Board of Governors Professor of English and Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies at Rutgers University-Newark.

Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden, winner of a Whiting Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, winner of the Sillerman Prize. Her poems have been translated into over 10 languages. Osman's photographs and experimental media have been exhibited by Bienal de São Paulo, Fotogalerie Friedrichshain, HKW, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, Arts Incubator, Ύλη[matter]HYLE, and the New York African Film Festival. Her films include: WAVES, The Ascendants, Sam Underground, The Fly Collectors, and Sun of the Soil. These films have played in numerous festivals and were awarded an ECU Award for Best Independent Documentary, and a Dikalo Award for Best Short Documentary, among other honors. She lives in New York.