-
Podcast #8: Safia Elhillo
Safia Elhillo is an award-winning poet who performs regularly and whose writing has been published in various journals and anthologies, the New Daugthers of Africa anthology just being one of the latest one. In 2016, her chapbook Asmarani was included in the New Generation African Poets Box Set. Her debut collection The January Children, was published in 2017 and won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. In 2018, she was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Her latest book is the anthology Halal If You Hear Me. The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 3 which she co-edited with Fatimah Asghar. In this episode (recorded…
-
“All the ghosts of life/ assemble before us”
This March started with a bang for poetry. On the first day of the month, University Press of Nebraska published Tjawangwa Dema’s debut collection The Careless Seamstress and Mahtem Shiferraw’s sophomore collection Your Body is War as part of the African Poetry Book Series. Both poets are deeply invested in interrogating the ways women experience this world and crafting a specific language and imagery to capture these experiences. Tjawangwa Dema’s chapbook Mandible had been included in the box set Seven New Generation African Poets five years ago – other poets of that group like Warsan Shire, Nick Makoha, and Ladan Osman have also gone on to publish celebrated works since. Now it is Dema’s turn…
-
Podcast #2: Musa Okwonga
Musa Okwonga is a poet, essayist, journalist, writer, and musician. His writing has appeared in several outlets. He has published two books on football – A Cultured Left Foot (2007) and Will You Manage? (2010) – as well as a poetry collection (Eating Roses for Dinner). Okwonga contributed to award-winning anthologies like The Good Immigrant (2016) and Change Gonna Come (2018). One of his essays (“The Good Bisexual”) is included in the upcoming book Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space (ed. Eric Osuwu). His “future blues” band BBXO released its first singles last year and already garnered a good amount of praise. If you want to follow and support his work, you can check out his…
