Celebrating Cultural Roots and Literary Excellence …
Kweku Abimbola, a poet of Gambian, Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Sierra Leonean descent, has been chosen for this yr’s Poet Laureate Fellowship programme, powered by the Academy of American Poets.
He’s considered one of twenty-three poets throughout the US who’ve been awarded fellowships value $50,000 for his or her literary excellence, enabling them to undertake impactful and well timed tasks that have interaction their communities via the transformative energy of poetry.
The Academy’s Poet Laureate Fellowship programme, now in its seventh yr, will fund fellows’ group tasks that put poetry on the centre of particular person and collective experiences.
“The Academy of American Poets is jazzed to champion wide-ranging poetry tasks produced by poets laureate in huge cities and small cities alike all throughout the nation, spanning poetry festivals, anthologies, nooks, and cookbooks to toll-free poetry hotlines, jail workshops, public seaside readings, and billboards,” stated Tess O’Dwyer, Board Chair of the Academy. “At a time when extra readers are turning to poetry to make sense of the world round us, American poets are beacons of free expression, cultural perception, and civic engagement.”
Abimbola’s first full-length poetry assortment, Saltwater Calls for a Psalm (Graywolf Press, 2023), was chosen by Tyehimba Jess to obtain the 2022 Academy of American Poets’ First Ebook Award; it additionally received the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. In 2023, he acquired a gold medal Florida Ebook Award. He’s presently an assistant professor of English and inventive writing at Loyola Marymount College.
Abimbola will maintain a sequence of 4 intergenerational, generative writing workshops led by Black and Indigenous writers and artists. Along with bringing numerous teams of poets collectively, these workshops will spotlight Indigenous conceptions of environmental sustainability and ecopoetics, whereas additionally foregrounding the often-forgotten historical past of Black El Segundo. The workshops will culminate in an anthology that options work from El Segundo college students and residents that celebrates the pure fantastic thing about town.
The Academy of American Poets is the US’ main champion of poets and poetry. The organisation yearly awards greater than $1.3 million to poets throughout the U.S. It additionally operates Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly-funded poetry web site, and organises Nationwide Poetry Month, one of many largest literary celebrations on the planet. Moreover, the Academy publishes Poem-a-Day and American Poets journal, gives free instructional sources for grownup learners, and leads the Poetry Coalition, a community of organisations devoted to selling the very important position of poetry in American tradition.