How a backup plan led to international acclaim: “I never liked being constrained”

When Mugabi Byenkya says he didn’t plan to become an internationally acclaimed author, he means it. Many professional writers play coy about their ambitions, but Byenkya was in fact well on his way to an entirely different career.

“I was doing a fellowship, working on an academic journal article, and I was in that world of academia,” says Byenkya (c’14).

After earning degrees in Environmental Science and Global & International Studies at KU, he began graduate school in environmental justice at the University of Michigan. Just one semester passed before medical emergencies intervened. Byenkya experienced two back-to-back strokes in late 2014. Doctors told him the prognosis was grim and could even be fatal.

“In my mind, after graduating, I had a plan. I'm going to have a career and then I'm going to write on the side. And it just so happened that because of health, the career was no longer possible, so the writing on the side had to become the career,” he said.

Faced with those prospects, Byenkya decided to author a memoir, Dear Philomena. The title comes from what was supposed to be his name—his mother was expecting a daughter— but turned into a sort of alternative identity that Byenkya could converse with literarily about topics too uncomfortable to broach with friends and family. Dear Philomena’s success led to multiple reprints and the beginning of new poetry, essays, and spoken word performances since 2017.

Byenkya credits his writing acumen more to personal experience than training alone, but themes from his studies still shine through in his collection of works. Environmental science courses explore the physical world we live in, while Global & International Studies grapples with the social and political structures that occupy those spaces. Byenkya’s choice in majors was always intentionally interdisciplinary—in part because the University Honors Program encourages studies across fields.

“I never liked being constrained to one particular thing, and I couldn't see myself doing one thing for the rest of my life and being happy,” he said. “I’ve always been really good at science but also really attuned toward the arts and writing. I didn’t want to have to give one up for the other.”

The decisions of what to study and what to write about make even more sense considering Byenkya’s personal experiences. In his 2020 essay “Ode to Bucket Baths,” he explores the intersection between class privilege and able-bodied privilege, through the act of bathing. Bathing is a relatively mundane activity to most. It is a very different experience for disabled bodies like Byenkya. Though bucket baths represent poverty to some, and comfort to others still, to Byenkya, they are a way of reclaiming control.

“The way I move through the world is very different than the majority of people do, and I feel like people really don’t understand the gravity of the situation unless I’m very explicit with it,” Byenkya says of his writing. “And it's also therapeutic for me to write so viscerally and to get that out on the page.”

Even when touching on heavy topics, some of Byenkya’s work is still upbeat. His latest piece is a foray into a new genre: comics. Co-created with illustrator Paul Bourgeois, “Married Myself” invokes self-acceptance in the face of racism and ableism.

“I pledge my faith to thee,” it reads. “I pledge myself to me.”