Nigerian poet Chiwenite Onyekwelu has been named the 2026–2027 Donald E. Waterfall Scholar, becoming the second recipient of the annual poetry scholarship.
The poet was selected from a shortlist that included poets Frank Njugi and Chimezie Umeoka, with the applications judged by Isaiah Adepoju, the inaugural 2025–2026 Donald E. Waterfall Scholar, and poet and multidisciplinary artist Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi.
Founded by poet and storyteller Cara Waterfall to honor her father, Donald E. Waterfall (a Princeton PhD and diplomat), the Donald E. Waterfall (DEW) Scholarship Fund provides an emerging poet with financial support and a year of non-prescriptive, sustained mentorship. It exists to support emerging poets through care, mentorship, and sustained attention.
Struck by the discipline of Chiwenite’s poems, Isaiah Adepoju, the inaugural 2025–2026 Donald E. Waterfall Scholar, said:
“Chiwenite demonstrated both need and meticulous attention to craft in his application materials. His poems fascinated me because it talks seriously about what can easily turn sentimental: one’s relationship to one’s father in their times of dying. Yet Chiwenite retains control over his emotions, such that his discipline, especially with his description, shines through. All the poems can be read as one.
In the midst of the pain of watching one’s father go, the pain of realizing that the hope of surviving is a mirage, and, in Horse Theories, realizing that “My father/ was a good man. How did I see/ his fist his entire life?” In the midst of all this, there is hard-earned joy. A pastoral happiness. “I hear, in me,” the persona says, “a rising stride; a horse unstrapped,/ cut loose from reins.”
Poet and multidisciplinary artist Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi’s reading returned to that same emotional restraint. She affirmed, saying:
“Patience teaches a poet how to control time, to speed it up or slow it down. Chiwenite Onyekwelu’s immense grasp of emotion in his poems is unlike that of others. Many poets make vulnerability a tool, but only the astute ones know how to break it down succinctly and how to pick it up again without diminishing the longevity of the language. In these poems, he mourns his father in the most evocative ways, stretching language as far as it can bend:
“Forgive me, father, / for all the lies I told you out of love.
There was never water ahead.”
Chiwenite’s poems are so tender that even his line breaks embody that gentleness.”
Chiwenite Onyekwelu is a Nigerian poet and the author of the debut chapbook Exiled (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2025). His work has appeared in The Hudson Review, The Cincinnati Review, Rattle, The Adroit Journal, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2024 After the End Poetry Prize and PRISM International’s Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize.
Congratulations on your big win, Chiwenite Onyekwelu!
