The New Gen! Rising African Poets with Kwame Dawes & Chris Abani

Chris Abani, a Nigerian-born, award-winning poet and novelist, currently teaches at Northwestern University in Chicago. He is the recipient of a PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, a Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, and a Guggenheim Award.

Tjawangwa Dema / TJ Dema is a poet, arts administrator, teaching artist, and an Honorary Senior Research Associate in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. Her chapbook Mandible (Slapering Hol Press, 2014) was selected for publication by The African Poetry Book Fund as part of its inaugural New Generation African Poets boxset. The Careless Seamstress (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) won the Sillerman Prize for African Poetry. Her work has been supported by The Danish Arts Council, the Vermont Studio Centre and Northwestern University’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities among others. She has been named a Botswana Top 40 under 40 Catalyst, as well as Mail and Guardian Editor’s Choice award recipient.

Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau (The Origin of Name) is a documentary photographer and poet from Nigeria. He is an assistant editor at Animal Heart Press and a contributing editor at Barren magazine. He writes on loss, child abuse, and absence. His work has been featured in Gaze, Mojave Heart Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Honey & Lime, and elsewhere. He was the runner-up for the 2019 Sehvage Poetry Prize. His chapbook, The Arrival of Rain, was published in early 2020.

Afua Ansong (Try Kissing God) is a Ghanaian American scholar and artist currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Rhode Island. Her work interrogates representations of black female subjectivities in African diaspora literature. She received an MFA from Stony Brook University and is the author of the chapbook American Mercy.

Fatima Camara (YellowLine) is a writer and spoken word artist from Minneapolis, MN. She is a TruArtSpeaks Be Heard alumna who has performed all over the Twin Cities metro area. Her passion for writing comes from her desire to highlight the stories of young first-generation Black people. Camara is a student at Metropolitan State University and works as the programs associate for TruArtSpeaks—an arts based nonprofit organization that cultivates literacy, leadership, and social justice through the study and application of spoken word and hip-hop culture.

Sadia Hassan (Enumeration) is a Somali writer and advocate for first-generation college students. She grew up in Atlanta, GA and currently resides in Oakland, CA. Her poetry and essays have appeared most recently in The Seventh Wave, Longreads, and the anthology Halal If You Hear Me.

Safia Jama (Notes on Resilience) was born to a Somali father and an Irish American mother in Queens, New York. A Cave Canem fellow, she has published poetry in Ploughshares, RHINO, Cagibi, Boston Review, Spoken Black Girl, and No, Dear. Her poetry has also been featured on WNYC’s Morning Edition and CUNY TV’s Shades of U.S. series. Jama was a semifinalist in the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry.

Henneh Kyereh Kwaku (Revolution of the Scavengers) graduated from the University of Health and Allied Sciences in Ghana with a Bachelor of Public Health (Disease Control). His writing has been published or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, New South Journal, Three Drops from a Cauldron, Ghana Writes, Lunaris Review, Kalahari Review, Praxis magazine, Agbowó, and elsewhere. He is from Gonasua in the Bono Region of Ghana. Contact him via Twitter or Instagram at @kwaku_kyereh.

Nadra Mabrouk (Measurement of Holy) is a poet from Cairo, Egypt, currently living in New York. She is the recipient of the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and the 2019 Poets & Writers Amy Award. She holds an MFA from the New York University creative writing program, where she was a Goldwater fellow. Her work has appeared in Poetry, RHINO, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me, among other publications. She is the author of the chapbook How Things Tasted When We Were Young. She currently works at the Academy of American Poets as a content assistant.

Nkateko Masinga (Psalm for Chrysanthemums) is a South African poet and 2019 fellow of the Ebedi International Writers Residency. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2018 and her work has received support from Pro Helvetia Johannesburg, an initiative of the Swiss Arts Council. Her written work has appeared in Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, Illuminations, the University of Edinburgh’s Dangerous Women Project, and elsewhere. She is a contributing interviewer for poetry at Africa In Dialogue, an online magazine that archives creative and critical insights with Africa’s leading storytellers.

Jamila Osman (A Girl Is a Sovereign State) is a Somali poet and essayist from Portland, Oregon. A public school teacher for many years, she is now an MFA student at the University of Iowa. A VONA/Voices alumna, she has received fellowships from Caldera, Djerassi, and the MacDowell Colony. She was cowinner of the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and 2019 winner of the Adirondack Review’s 46er Prize for Poetry. Some of her work can be found in the New York Times, Al Jazeera, BOAAT, Catapult, Diagram, and other places.

Tryphena Yeboah (A Mouthful of Home) is a native of Bekwai, Ghana. She holds a BA in Journalism and an MA in Development Communication from the Ghana Institute of Journalism. She is currently an English graduate fellow in Chapman University’s creative writing program.