Nigerian poet Gbenga Adesina has been named to the longlist for the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection, one of the categories in the 2026 PEN America Literary Awards. He was longlisted for his poetry collection, Death Does Not End at the Sea, published by the University of Nebraska Press.
The PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection recognises a poet for a distinguished poetry collection by a U.S. resident or citizen that has expanded the scope of American poetry. The award includes a $5,000 prize and is judged by a panel of poets and literary figures. Adesina is the only Africa-based African writer to appear on the 2026 PEN America longlists.
Death Does Not End at the Sea is a full-length poetry collection that explores exile, travel, and spiritual journeys through figures shaped by history and displacement. The poems follow a son who dreams of carrying his dead father across the sea, a Black father who travels with his child to Paris, southern France, Turkey, and Senegal in search of the ghost of James Baldwin and a deeper understanding of his ancestral roots, and a group of immigrants crossing the Mediterranean who sing in order not to drown, in a sequence that evokes the Middle Passage. Written in a lyrical voice that blends the contemporary with the ancient, the collection examines themes of fragile citizenship, migration, mourning, and the enduring bond between the living and the dead.
The book was released by the University of Nebraska Press, which publishes contemporary poetry and scholarly literary works.
A Nigerian poet and essayist, Gbenga Adesina is the author of the poetry collection Death Does Not End at the Sea (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), which was long-listed for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Voelcker Award. Adesina was the 2019–2020 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University.
He is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Black Global and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Centre at James Madison University. He received his master’s of fine arts from New York University, where Yusef Komunyakaa mentored him. He is the co-founder and editor of A Long House, a journal of diasporic art, thought, and literature. He has won multiple fellowships, and his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Guernica, Narrative Magazine, The Yale Review, The Best American Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.
Congratulations, Gbenga Adesina!
