‘To vision, to passion, to the lifting of the poor, to the liberation of the masses.Dad.Mentor.Lover.Dear friend.’ – @Gbadenaija
Nigerian born Gbenga Adesina is a poet and essayist, joint winner of the 2016 BRUNEL UNIVERSITY AFRICAN POETRY PRIZE, first Nigerian to win the prestigious Prize, and 2016 Norman Mailer Poetry Fellow at Pepperdine University Malibu, California. He has received scholarships and residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Vermont Studio Center in the United States. He was a 2015 Open Society Foundation Poetry Residency Fellow on Goree Island where his poem was displayed at the Musée Historique (Historical Museum).
His chapbook, Painter of Water, is published in the 2016 New Generation African Poets series by University of Nebraska and Akashic Books, New York. Gbenga’s poems interrogate love and loss, longing, memory, displacement, the lyric rendering of trauma, body as evidence, specie memory, filial lineages and everydayness. Some of them have been published in Jalada, Brittle Paper, Premium Times, Praire Schooner and the New York Times.
Photo & Story credit: lagospoetryfestival.com