Lupenga Mphande is among Malawi's leading linguists, poets, and writers. A prize-winning poet, he has published two volumes of his poems, Crackle at Midnight (1998) and Messages Left Behind (2011), and contributed many poems to such major anthologies as When My Brothers Come Home: Poems from Central and Southern Africa (1995), The Heinemann Book of African Poetry in English (1991), Poems-Deep and Dangerous (1995), and Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Love Poetry (2009). He is currently Professor of African and African American Studies at Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.