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.
TOWARD A LIVING ARCHIVE OF AFRICAN POETRY collects Kwame Dawes’s and Chris Abani’s introductory essays for the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Box Set Series. These essays are conversations that celebrate the work of emerging African poets and build—meticulously and with principled care—a vision of a pluralistic literary community in which poets may thrive. Over more than ten years, Dawes and Abani have offered readers a glimpse into their editorial labor and philosophy, which are guided by generosity and curiosity and trust in the work of African poets. Dawes’s and Abani’s editorial labor is a gift, an expansive curation that honors the past, present, and future of African literature.
In 2024, the APBF celebrates the publication of the tenth edition of the New-Generation African Poets Chapbooks Box Sets. Each of the box sets, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, feature 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. They advance a transnational vision of and for African poetry, one arising from their literary leadership 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. For, as they mention in their introduction to NANE, “the idea of a poetic community enacts the promise of being seen.”
Om författaren
CHRIS ABANI’s prose includes The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song for Night, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, Grace Land, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections include Smoking the Bible, Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me the Sun, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne’s Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He holds a BA and MA in English, an MA in gender and culture, and a Ph D in literature and creative writing. Abani 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 fellowship. He won the prestigious 2024 UNT Rilke Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Born in Nigeria, he is currently on the board of trustees, a professor of English, and director of African Studies at Northwestern University.