- Hardcover: 350 pages
- Published: 10/26/21
- IBSN: 9781617759505
- Genre: Poetry
Catalog » Browse by Title: N » New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Nane)
This fourteen-piece, limited-edition box set—an African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) project—features the work of thirteen new African poets.
“The African Poetry Book Fund’s New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set is one of the most important annual literary projects, presenting to a wide audience the work of fresh and promising poets in the continent and its diaspora.”
—Open Country Magazine
Included in Publishers Weekly’s Adult 2021 Announcements (Poetry)
Praise for the chapbook box set series:
“Dawes and Abani have taken on the vital project of publishing short collections by contemporary poets from Africa, packaged together in beautiful boxed sets.”
—New York Times Magazine
“An ambitious, vital project that delivers exactly what it promises . . . As a group, the chapbooks dispel stereotypes about African writing. They also illustrate what editors Dawes and Abani note about the many ways poets can understand or redefine their ties to Africa. These insights are poignant and valuable, especially at a time when millions around the globe find themselves somewhere between new countries and ancestral lands they’ve left behind.”
—Washington Post
“A collection pulsing with fresh talent in a series that poetry lovers worldwide should be grateful for.”
—Shelf Awareness
The limited-edition box set is a project started in 2014 to ensure the publication of up to a dozen chapbooks every year by African poets through Akashic Books. The series seeks to identify the best poetry written by African poets working today, and it is especially interested in featuring poets who have not yet published their first full-length book of poetry.
The thirteen poets included in this box set are: Selina Nwulu, Ayan M. Omar, Jeremy Teddy Karn, Ajibola Tolase, Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu, Sara Elkamel, Precious Arinze, Lameese Badr, Qutouf Yahia, Edil Hassan, Kolawole Adebayo, Cynthia Amoah, and Saradha Soobrayen
Read a feature from World Literature Today interviewing co-editors Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani.
KWAME DAWES’s debut novel She’s Gone (Akashic) was the winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award (Debut Fiction). He is the author of twenty-one books of poetry and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. In 2016, his book Speak from Here to There, a cowritten collection of verse with Australian poet John Kinsella, was released along with When the Rewards Can Be So Great: Essays on Writing and the Writing Life, which Dawes edited. His most recent collection, City of Bones: A Testament, was published in 2017. His awards include the Forward Poetry Prize, the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the Musgrave Silver Medal, several Pushcart Prizes, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, and an Emmy Award. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and is Chancellor Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. Dawes serves as the associate poetry editor for Peepal Tree Press and is director of the African Poetry Book Fund. He is series editor of the African Poetry Book Series—the latest of which is Tisa: New-Generation African Poets, A Chapbook Box Set—and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2018 was elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Bivouac is his latest work published by Akashic.
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. He is the editor of Lagos Noir and the coeditor of Tisa: New-Generation African Poets, A Chapbook Box Set.