Nigerian poet Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s The Origin of Wounds has been selected as a co-winner of the 2025 Julie Suk Award.
The collection, published by Anhinga Press, shares the award with Arah Ko’s Brine Orchid, published by YesYes Books. The two winning books were selected by Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina’s Poet Laureate and the final judge for this year’s award.
In her words, Jaki Shelton Green had this to say about Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s The Origin of Wounds:
“The Origin of Wounds (Anhinga Press) captures the place beyond mourning and amplifies the amputated wails of birds carrying the history of witness above shattered breathless humanity. Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, in this debut collection, brings us to a global precipice where the intimacy of everydayness bleeds into history, war, space, and time. The language of memory, identity, and resistance coexists with an unmuted love, demonstrating that vulnerability itself can be an act of power.”
Previously selected as the winner of the 2024 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, The Origin of Wounds captures the place beyond mourning and amplifies the amputated wails of birds carrying the history of witness above shattered, breathless humanity. Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, in this debut collection, brings the readers to a global precipice where the intimacy of everydayness bleeds into history, war, space, and time. The language of memory, identity, and resistance coexists with an unmuted love, demonstrating that vulnerability itself can be an act of power.
A Nigerian poet, performer, translator, essayist, and an emerging DH scholar. RASAQ MALIK GBOLAHAN is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó, he is also a cofounder of Àtélẹwó, the first digital journal devoted to publishing literary work written in the Yorùbá language. He is the author of the poetry chapbooks No Home In This Land, selected for Chapbook Box edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, and The Other Names of Grief, published by Konya Shamsrumi.
His work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, African American Review, Beloit, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, LitHub, Michigan Quarterly Review, Minnesota Review, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Rattle, Salt Hill, Spillway, Stand, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.
He received an Honourable Mention in the 2015 Best of the Net for his work published in One. In 2017, Rattle and Poet Lore nominated his poems for the Pushcart Prize. He was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2017. He was a finalist for the Sillerman First Book for African Poets in 2018. His co-edited anthology, African Urban Echoes, was published in Spring 2025 by Griots Lounge, Canada.
The Julie Suk Award, administered by Jacar Press, recognises any poetry book published by a small, literary, or university press.
Congratulations, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan!
