- Paperback
- Published: 8/5/25
- IBSN: 9781636142555
- e-IBSN: 9781636142562
- Genre: Nonfiction, Poetry
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Toward a Living Archive of African Poetry
Celebrating ten years of New-Generation African Poets, Toward a Living Archive of African Poetry presents Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani’s unprecedented disquisition on the state of African poetry.
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What people are saying…
“Since 2014, editors Dawes and Abani have been curating chapbooks penned by emerging African poets to create texts as beautifully printed as they are vital in their living and breathing words. Here, they’ve compiled their introductions to each chapbook box set they have produced during the decade from 2014 through 2024. Their introductory essays are both manifesto and new poetics, written in conversation with the voices of the poets who comprise a thriving African literary community. By publishing the introductory essays in a single volume, they offer a beautifully rendered and evolving conversation that is scholarly and theoretical yet viscerally human, as the best poetry often is . . . This collection offers a theoretical, historical, and cultural framework for African poetry and poetics that could be read as a stand-alone text or used as an entry point into any (or all) of the poets described.”
—Library Journal, STARRED review
Description
TOWARD A LIVING ARCHIVE OF AFRICAN POETRY collects the introductory essays of the New-Generation African Poetry chapbook box sets written by editors Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. Celebrating ten years of their dedication to publishing chapbooks by emerging African poets, this volume offers a glimpse into Abani and Dawes’s editorial labor and conceptualization of an inclusive African poetic. Here is African poetry as capacious transnational phenomenon; as polyvocal, linguistically layered journey; as intergenerational conversation; as grappling with traditions and futures in the present tense of modernity; and much more.
FROM THE FOREWORD BY SIWAR MASANNAT:
In 2024, the African Poetry Book Fund celebrates the publication of the tenth box set in the New-Generation African Poets series. Each of the box sets, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, features a selection of chapbooks by emerging African authors who have not yet published a full-length collection of poetry . . . Many thought-provoking threads related to African poetics appear across the essays . . . [T]hey advance a transnational vision for African poetry. Their literary leadership helps to imagine and create a landscape in which the work of as many poets as possible can thrive, receive recognition, and be preserved for future generations.
- Subjects: Black Interest, Nonfiction, Poetry
- Tags: Toward a Living Archive of African Poetry
Book Details
Authors
Kwame Dawes is the Ghana-born, award-winning author of twenty-two books of poetry—including Sturge Town from Norton—and numerous other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. He has won Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emmy, and was the 2019 awardee of the Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry. He is series editor of the African Poetry Book Series—the latest of which is Kumi: New-Generation African Poets, A Chapbook Box Set. He currently teaches at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Author Events
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 Kumi: New-Generation African Poets, A Chapbook Box Set.
SIWAR MASANNAT is a Jordanian writer and the author of cue and 50 Water Dreams. Masannat works as managing editor of the African Poetry Book Fund and Prairie Schooner.