Pierre Mujomba joined the Champlain College learning community this past fall as the institution's first City of Refuge visiting writer and the second recipient of the Roger H. Perry endowed chair. The City of Refuge program is a national initiative that offers writers facing persecution in their home countries a sanctuary where they can continue to work. Other Cities of Refuge include Ithaca, New York; Las Vegas; and Pittsburgh.

Mujomba, a playwright of international acclaim, is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which he fled in 2003 after the French-language publication of his best-known work, La Dernière Envelope (English title, The Lost Envelope). The play, which concerns the regime of former DRC president Mobutu Sese Seko, has been translated into English, as has Kalemba's Year without Pay.

During his residence over the 2008-2009 academic year, Mujomba will write plays, visit classes as a guest lecturer, present readings of his work, and possibly teach in the spring semester. Being away from the DRC, he says, allows him to express himself more freely. "In Congo we have the system of censorship," he says. "When I'm writing in Congo, I'm censoring myself. [Here] you're freer to write what you want. You have freedom to write all you can write ... Also, when I'm here, I am not only a Congolese writer. I am an African writer. It is important because when I'm writing, I'm no longer writing for a very small group. I try to write as an African who wants to let people know here what happened in Africa."

Prior to coming to Champlain College, Mujomba was a visiting fellow in the Africana Studies department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He also recently worked as a consultant on African linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University and has presented his work and lectured widely in North America, France, Belgium, and his native country. He holds a master's degree in French and African linguistics from the National Pedagogic University in Kinshasa, DRC.