Black Warrior Review (BWR) has announced the 2024 winner of its annual poetry contest and it is none other than Nigerian poet, Hussain Ahmed. Hussain won the poetry contest with his captivating poem, “Song of Summer”, set to be published in issue 51.2 of BWR which is slated for release in early 2025. His artist statement on “Song of Summer” reads thus:
“The poem examines how repetition enhances or alters the concept of the African drums and celebrations. The Yoruba chorus in the poem was the nucleus for what became the Song of Summer. It was also partly because I am interested in the colourful nature of the many Nigerian cultures.”
This year’s winner was selected by Donika Kelly, the author of The Renunciations, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Among other things, she is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.
BWR is named after the Black Warrior River, a name honouring Chief Tuskaloosa, a paramount chief of the Mississippi nations. Like the river, the journal is constantly changing & deeply resilient. It is the longest-running journal helmed by graduate students in the United States, running continuously since 1974. While it’s based in Alabama and pride itself on featuring local writers and artists alongside Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners, it has serious national reach and are often considered on the forefront of experimental, fabulist, and all-around “weird” literature and a home for marginalized voices.
Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian poet and environmentalist, known for his collection Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile, which was a 2023 honoree by the Society of Midland Authors and a finalist for the Luchei Prize for African Poetry. His second collection, Blue Exodus, won the 2022 Orison Poetry Prize. Hussain’s work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Electric Lit, A Public Space, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.
Congratulations, Hussain!
Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim
Ibrahim is a Nigerian writer and editor currently based in the UK. He won the Quramo Writers' Prize in 2022 and was selected for the Best Small Fictions anthology in 2024. He was a finalist for the Faber Children's FAB Prize (2023), the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship (2022), a Masters Review anthology prize (2023), and twice for the Moon City Short Fiction Award (2022 & 2023). He has also been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2022), the Laura Kinsella Fellowship (2022), and the Dzanc Diverse Voices Prize (2021). He has multiple nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. Among other things, he is currently the Managing Editor at JAY Lit and a Fiction Judge at NYC Midnight. He’s @heemthewriter on Twitter and Facebook, and @writtenbyheem on Instagram and Threads. His work can be found on https://linktr.ee/heemthewriter.
