Mubanga is a multi-award-winning artist. Her first novel, The Mourning Bird (Jacana Media) won the 2019 Dinaane Debut Fiction Award, making her the first and only Zambian to win the prize since its inception in 2004. She won the Kalemba Short Story Prize 2019 and the Tell Your Own Story Awards Zambia 2020. Her short stories have appeared on shortlists for the Bristol Short Story Prize, Nobrow Short Story Prize and Dreamers Creative Writing.

Her work has appeared on Netflix, and in literary journals including Doek!, Overland, Killens Review of Arts and Letters, The Red Rock Review, Aster(ix) and The Menteur. Her poems and short stories have been translated and published in Italian by Menelique.

She has an LLB from Cavendish University Zambia and an LLM from the University of Minnesota. Mubanga practised law in Zambia until 2019. She is now an MFA candidate at Hamline University, where she received the 2020 Writer of Color Merit Scholarship and the 2021 Deborah Keenan Poetry Award. Mubanga is an alumna of the Hubert H. Humphrey (Fulbright) Fellowship and the Young African Leaders Initiative for her research into Prisoners’ rights.

When she isn’t writing, Mubanga works as a Fiction Editor for Doek! and Assistant Fiction Editor for the Water~Stone Review. She is a current Jacobson Scholar and recipient of the Hawkinson Scholarship Fund for Peace and Justice 2021.