- Paperback
- Published: 8/5/25
- IBSN: 9781636142555
- e-IBSN: 9781636142562
- Genre: Nonfiction, Poetry
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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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Forthcoming: 8/5/25
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 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 PREFACE BY SIWAR MASANNAT:
In 2024, the African Poetry Book Fund celebrates the publication of the tenth edition of the New- Generation African Poets Chapbook Box Set 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 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.
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.
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.