Poetry

A hopeful, music-infused poetry collection from Congolese poet Alain Mabanckou. These compelling poems by novelist and essayist Alain Mabanckou conjure nostalgia for an African childhood where the fauna, flora, sounds, and smells evoke snapshots of a...

Motown, the crossover label made rhythm and blues the soul of American popular culture. Join us in honoring the artists connected to Hitsville, USA, and 30 years' worth of "The Sound of Young America." We asked contributors to show us their knowledge of...

Bilie Na Ntụ / Rise from the Ashes by Catherine Okoronkwo is a bilingual collection of extraordinary range and emotional depth, rooted in grief, faith, protest, and cultural inheritance. Switching fluently between English, Nigerian Pidgin, and...

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...

THE POEMS IN 82ND DIVISION, written in various forms including the villanelle, sonnet, blues poem, duplex, ode, and dramatic monologue, among many others, are collectively a love song to the author's native Nigeria--a former British colony. In the...

Winner of the 2024 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan's "The Origin of Wounds" exhumes fragments of historical accounts that bring us face-to-face with the brutality of national and global wars. Malik's pivotal poems address personal and...

Jonathan Chibuike Ukah, a celebrated lyrical voice among the African Diaspora, reminds us how the present and future are molded from our origins. Love, grief, the marching of time and spiritual endurance weave their varying modal melodies into a single...

Tainted Coffee With 3 Teaspoons of Sugar is a collection of poems and short reflections about survival, faith, and the slow work of healing after abuse. Darcel Ranay Gibson writes with honesty and care, helping readers go from shock and sorrow toward...

The 2024 Moon City Poetry Award How do our ancestors inhabit the world that they have abandoned? What is the place of our family in our hearts? In this stunning debut collection, Ìfẹ́ol?wa Àyànd?l? reveals this interior...

In this profound and groundbreaking narrative, Ethiopian-born Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes weaves together stories of heritage and heartache.This unique memoir celebrates the beauty of Ethiopian culture while mourning its erosion - first under colonial forces,...

Some scars are never seen-but they shape everything we become.In Unseen Scars: Cold, Cruel, Deeply Rooted and Ever Present, memory, identity, and lived experience collide in a powerful collection of poetry and reflection. These pages explore the quiet...

In Telepath, award-winning poet, Akua Lezli Hope offers poems reporting from those with the remains of the gift that we all once shared. Telepath wrestles with the promises, possibilities and constraints of this endowment.This exploration sojourns beyond...