New-Generation African Poets: A chapbook box set (Nane)

Description

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) "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.

Kwame Dawes is the Ghana-born, award-winning author of twenty-one books of poetry 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 currently teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.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.

Critical Praise for Previous New-Generation African Poets Box Sets: Chris Abani and Dawes also edited Tatu, a collection of contemporary poetry by African poets due out in the spring, as part of their yearly New-Generation African Poets Series. --the Root The chapbooks gathered here are almost overflowing with voice . . . . Each of these chapbooks is so worthy of praise and attention that it is not possible to do them justice in the space afforded this review. They deserve, and hopefully will receive, the specific and individual attention of critics and readers, and their authors deserve to enjoy long and noted careers. --Untucked Magazine, on Eight New-Generation African Poets I've been spending time with Eight New-Generation African Poets, a chapbook set edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. In particular, I recommend the selection of poems by Vuyelwa Maluleke, full of devastating pronouncements. --Kenyon Review We live in a curated world; the beauty of this collection is not just in the interplay of cover art and text, of preface and poem, but especially in its overall optimistic effect. This isn't a curatorial project solely focused on refining our world, cutting it down to manageable size, reflecting the literary interests of its editors. Though it does this, it simultaneously opens up a whole new emergent modern trajectory of African poetry, adding to it words that are surprising not in their existence--we know that with greater funding, similar projects, changing patterns of readership, more than eight, more than ten new African poetry chapbooks of this quality could reach us each year--but in their specific, trenchant voices. Start clearly off a set of shelves--this is something to make space for, year after year. --Africa in Words, on Eight New-Generation African Poets