Chestnut Review has announced three titles as their Autumn Reading Period Chapbook Selections and one of them is “Uncensored Snapshots” by Zaynab Bobi’s.
According to Zaynab, “Uncensored Snapshots” is a chapbook she first started working on as a collection before deciding to make it into a chapbook. This was because she felt that the theme of the poems were very personal and painful to write a full collection out of, especially while still studying. The chapbook is filled with poems about the insecurity in the Northern Nigeria and also her family’s encounter with it. As an inspiration, Zaynab cited when her grandfather, the Chief District of Bobi (Hakimi), was kidnapped. She says the chapbook’s poems are about bargaining, post-traumatic challenges, force-politeness to the kidnappers, and a lot more. She describes it as a chapbook she wishes she didn’t have to write, saying: I wish I didn’t have to write it, but if I don’t, who is going to document it?”
Zaynab is a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer. She is a graduate of Medical Laboratory Science from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbooks Sixteen Songs of Loss, selected as a finalist by Rita Mookerjee (Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition, 2023) and winner of the inaugural Folorunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize 2023, Labari Poetry Prize 2023, the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature 2023, and Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize, 2022. Her works has appeared and are forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Fiyah Literary Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Agbowo, The Deadlands, Torch Literary Arts, Arc Poetry Magazine, Ake Review, Native Skin, The Drift, Lucent Dreaming, 20.35 Africa, Canthius, Trampset, and elsewhere.
Congratulations, Zaynab!
