NNE: New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set
Description
This eleven-piece, limited-edition box set—an African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) project—features the work of ten new African poets.
“An amazing assemblage in this set of ten chapbooks. The entirety of it—the books and the language, the art and the binding—is a thing of beauty, and reading it is an experience not to be missed.” —New York Journal of Books
The limited-edition box set is an annual project started in 2014 to ensure the publication of seven to ten chapbooks 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 ten poets included in this box set are: Yasmin Belkhyr, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Chekwube O. Danladi, Mary-Alice Daniel, Lena Bezawork Grönlund, Ashley Makue, Momtaza Mehri, Famia Nkansa, Ejiofor Ugwu, and Chimwemwe Undi.
Praise for NNE: New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set
Profound and thought-provoking . . . A fascinating collection of diverse voices bringing new ideas to the world of poetry.
— The Journal (West Virginia)
New-Generation African Poets is 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
This limited-edition box set of ten African poets is gorgeous. Not only does it introduce readers to the best poetry by contemporary poets of the African and the African diaspora, it showcases the art of Eritrean painter Ficre Ghebreyesus . . . As Abani says in his preface, no body has been more commoditized and dehumanized than the black body, the African body. The collection provides space for these reclamations. The poets write about religion, political issues, memory and forgetting, immigrant experiences and relationships. Some poems are quiet and reflective, some lively and sharp, all using sound and metaphor in unexpected ways.
— Newcity
Edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, the yearly poetry chapbook set is a delightful combination of emerging African poets. This year’s collection is no less ambitious in its scope: Nne introduces poets of a singular talent, exploring themes of belonging, questioning lands and seas that offer them refuge and refuse them at the same time. Giving voice to new poets is a particularly necessary task, and the African Poetry Book Fund continues to do so every year.
— World Literature Today, included in “What to Read Now: Selected Works from the African Diaspora”
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, on New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Tatu)