Nigerian poet and essayist, Gbenga Adesina has been announced as the 2024 winner of the Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for his book, Death Does Not End At The Sea. He will receive a $3,000 award along with publication by the University of Nebraska Press
The prize was awarded by guest judges Joseph Millar and Hilda Raz, alongside Kwame Dawes, Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner.
Joseph Millar commended Adesina’s work, stating:
“This extraordinary collection, permeated with myth and with music, follows the deep filial attachment between father and son—the longing of the speaker for his deceased father and the bond he feels for his own young son. From the early poem, ‘I Carried My Father Across the Sea,’ to the imagined plight of contemporary migrants lost at sea in the title poem, it’s hard not to imagine the ghost-themes of death during the Middle Passage permeating the narrative”.
Gbenga Adesina is a winner of the 2023 Creative Writing Grant Award from Harvard University’s historic Woodberry Poetry Room and won the 2020 Narrative Prize. He is also the inaugural Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center. He holds an MFA from New York University and a PhD from Florida State University.
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Congratulations to Gbenga Adesina on this remarkable achievement!
Bakare Oluwatobiloba
I write to educate, motivate and define history with literature. Just being me!
