Celebrating Cultural Roots and Literary Excellence …
Kweku Abimbola, a poet of Gambian, Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Sierra Leonean descent, has been selected for this year’s Poet Laureate Fellowship programme, powered by the Academy of American Poets.
He is one of twenty-three poets across the United States who have been awarded fellowships worth $50,000 for their literary excellence, enabling them to undertake impactful and timely projects that engage their communities through the transformative power of poetry.
The Academy’s Poet Laureate Fellowship programme, now in its seventh year, will fund fellows’ community projects that put poetry at the centre of individual and collective experiences.
“The Academy of American Poets is jazzed to champion wide-ranging poetry projects produced by poets laureate in big cities and small towns alike all across the country, spanning poetry festivals, anthologies, nooks, and cookbooks to toll-free poetry hotlines, prison workshops, public beach readings, and billboards,” said Tess O’Dwyer, Board Chair of the Academy. “At a time when more readers are turning to poetry to make sense of the world around us, American poets are beacons of free expression, cultural insight, and civic engagement.”
Abimbola’s first full-length poetry collection, Saltwater Demands a Psalm (Graywolf Press, 2023), was selected by Tyehimba Jess to receive the 2022 Academy of American Poets’ First Book Award; it also won the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. In 2023, he received a gold medal Florida Book Award. He is currently an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Loyola Marymount University.
Abimbola will hold a series of four intergenerational, generative writing workshops led by Black and Indigenous writers and artists. In addition to bringing diverse groups of poets together, these workshops will highlight Indigenous conceptions of environmental sustainability and ecopoetics, while also foregrounding the often-forgotten history of Black El Segundo. The workshops will culminate in an anthology that features work from El Segundo students and residents that celebrates the natural beauty of the city.
The Academy of American Poets is the United States’ leading champion of poets and poetry. The organisation annually awards more than $1.3 million to poets across the U.S. It also operates Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly-funded poetry website, and organises National Poetry Month, one of the largest literary celebrations in the world. Additionally, the Academy publishes Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine, provides free educational resources for adult learners, and leads the Poetry Coalition, a network of organisations dedicated to promoting the vital role of poetry in American culture.