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.
About the Author: 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.
