Writers' Workshop graduates Adedayo Agarau and Othuke Umukoro will read from their new books of poetry.
Othuke Umukoro will read from his debut poetry collection, Fenestration, selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss as the winner of the 2024 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Tracie Morris says, “Othuke’s heart-centric new work, Fenestration, is filled with tender poems of discovery. They stay with the reader long after the end of a page, and the book. The strength of these poems is in the refined delicacy of understanding, through dilated pupils, the bayonets’ knife’s edge. Both through the intimacy of complex love between father and son, and the sweeping and intimate pain of those Africans whose involuntarily journeys created the African diaspora we know today, we comprehend what it means to perceive the world through haunted, multi-century somatic knowing."
Nigerian poet and playwright Othuke Umukoro won the prestigious Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2021, and while a student at the Writers’ Workshop was awarded the Academy of American Poets University Poetry Prize. He has taught at the University of Iowa and was the inaugural X.J. Kennedy Poetry Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center.
Adedayo Agarau will read from The Years of Blood, winner of the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers (Fordham University Press, Fall 2025). Remica Bingham-Risher says of The Years of Blood: "Evil is a question for God and beauty emerges despite what the politicians have ruined...In this harrowing collection, Agarau shapes and sifts through shadow until light treads steadily home." Meanwhile, poet Aracelis Girmay says, "With exquisite sensitivity, rigorous measure, and steadfastness, Agarau writes a history in which the personal and lyrical necessarily run through its marrow."
Adedayo Agarau was a Wallace Stegner Fellow ‘25, a Cave Canem Fellow and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine: A Journal of African Literature and Art, and a Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. He is the author of the chapbooks Origin of Name (African Poetry Book Fund, 2020) and The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020). He is currently working on a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.
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