The Best Net Anthology publication has revealed its 2024 contributors’ list across five different categories. Listed below are the writers representing Africa in the global literary space.
Poetry:
- Sihle Ntuli – “Blues for King Kong” (Aquifer: The Florida Review Online)
- Porsha Olayiwola – “Rodney King Mistakes The Deep End Of His Swimming Pool For The Atlantic Or Police Brutality Is A Middle Passage, Is A Flood” (The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database)
- Sodïq Oyèkànmí – “self-portrait as a boy languaging through fragmental spaces” (Longleaf Review)
Nonfiction :
- Jamila Osman – “Street View” (Bellingham Review)
About these contributors:
Sihle Ntuli is a poet, editor and classicist from Durban, South Africa, His honours include being shortlisted for the 2024 Alpine Poetry Prize, Runner Up for the 2024 Classical Association Poetry Competition & Winner of the 2024 Patricia Kailis Writing Fellowship. Ntuli is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Rumblin (uHlanga 2020) and The Nation (River Glass Books 2023), alongside two full-length collections Stranger (Aerial Publishing 2015) & Zabalaza Republic (Botsotso Publishing 2023). Sihle was JAY Lit‘s Spotlight poet for May 2024.
Porsha Olayiwola is an individual world poetry slam champion and the author of the collection i shimmer sometimes, too. Olayiwola is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston. She is a 2020 Academy of American Poets poet laureate fellow. Olayiwola is the assistant professor of poetry at Emerson College.
Sodïq Oyèkànmí is a poet, dramaturge and translator from Nigeria. A 2022/23 Poetry Translation Centre (UK) UNDERTOW Fellow. He is a recipient of the Unserious Collective Fellowship (2023) and won the Sevhage/ Hyginus Ekwuazi Poetry Prize (2023). His works are published/ forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Lucent Dreaming, Modern Poetry in Translation, North Dakota Quarterly, Passages North, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, Taco Bell Quarterly and Uncanny Magazine.
Jamila Osman is a Somali writer, educator, and community organiser. She has taught creative writing from Portland to Palestine, from summer camps to juvenile detention facilities, and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. She received the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, the 2021 Black Warrior Review’s Flash Contest award, and The Bellingham Review’s 2022 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the author of the poetry chapbook A Girl is a Sovereign State (Akashic 2020).
The Best of the Net is an awards-based anthology designed to grant a platform to a diverse and growing collection of writers and publishers who are building an online literary landscape that seeks to break free of traditional publishing. This space has been created to bring greater respect to the continually expanding world of exceptional digital publishing.
The Best of the Net Anthology began in 2006, a project created by Sundress Publications (with special thanks to founding editor Erin Elizabeth Smith), to gather communities of online literary magazines, journals, and individuals that do the work of creating their digital literary landscape. They believe this effort is integral in decentering the literary canon as well as promoting and amplifying voices that are imperative to good literature, responsible culture, and the understanding of today’s social climate. They cherish these writers and publishers and hold digital publishing in high regard as a medium that creates access to a greater array of voices than the traditional publishing climate has allowed.
Subsequent issues of the anthology, which highlight the work of the previous year, appear at the end of every January. Their submission period is open from July 1st to September 30th each year.
Congratulations to Sihle, Porsha, Sodïq, Jamila, and all the gifted contributors!
Read more on the contributors and their works here.
Bongiwe T. Maphosa
Bongiwe Maphosa is a writer whose fiction and poetry offers fresh, imaginative perspectives on the human condition. Her work has been published in prominent literary spaces, including Isele Magazine, Akowdee Magazine, the AVBOB Poetry Anthology, Journal of African Youth in Literature (JAY Lit), and more. She was also nominated for the 2025 Best of the Net Anthology. Bongiwe is one of six writers selected for the inaugural Caine Prize Online Editing program and serves as a content writer, peer reviewer, and tier three awards judge for JAYLit. Bridging inner reflection with speculative worlds, she continues to carve out a distinctive voice within contemporary African literature for a growing global audience.
