A Decade of African Poetry
For a decade, Ghanaian poet Kwame Dawes and his friend, Nigerian writer Chris Abani, have been sifting through manuscripts in search of Africa’s next generation of poetic talent. Since 2014, the African Poetry Book Fund has been curating an impressive collection of poetry through its New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series.
A chapbook is a small publication, typically under 40 pages, that serves as an accessible and respected format for poets to showcase their work. This series features emerging African poets, each presented in a beautifully designed box set containing 10 or more chapbooks. Alongside the poetry, each box set also highlights the work of a commissioned African visual artist. Artists such as Sokari Douglas Camp, Victor Ehikhamenor, Ficre Ghebreyesus, and Aida Muluneh have contributed to this growing archive.
This collection now includes over 100 poets, offering a glimpse into the rich diversity of African poetic expression today. To mark the project’s 10th anniversary, a new anthology titledToward a Living Archive of African Poetryhas been published. Edited by Jordanian writer Siwar Masannat, it compiles Dawes and Abani’s introductions to each box set and includes a foreword by Masannat. Readers gain insight into the impact of the series, revealing a layered account of how these chapbooks have elevated the visibility of African poets over the past decade.
The Cultural Movement Behind the Archive
As a scholar of African literature, my focus lies in uncovering overlooked histories and examining the spaces where literature is created and shared. This anthology is significant because it documents not just poems, but a cultural movement that redefines what an African literary archive can be, and why poetry remains central to this conversation.
The series is decidedly diasporic, shaped by Africans living outside the continent. Most of the poets reside in the US or the UK, while those based on the continent form a smaller, more geographically scattered group. The editors acknowledge this imbalance, attributing it to better access to workshops and craft education for diaspora poets. As a result, the archive reflects the sensibilities and infrastructures of the diaspora rather than the immediacies of the continent.
Nigeria plays a prominent role in shaping the aesthetics of the series, reflecting both the country’s dense literary networks and the curatorial choices of the editors. Personal connections and prize pools are key to discovering new talents. Many of the poets in the series identify as “hyphenated Africans,” such as Somali-American, Ghanaian-British, Ethiopian-German, or Sierra Leonean-American. Their Africanness is often rooted in memory, nostalgia, heritage, or family history rather than geography.
The editors assert that all the poets “self-identify as Africans in the full and complicated way that Africanness is best defined.” This expands the category of African poetry, demonstrating that today’s African poetry cannot be read solely through a nationalist lens. The hybridity of identity and place becomes central, with many poets occupying in-between spaces—culturally, geographically, linguistically, and emotionally.
Gender and Intergenerational Dialogue
The series has made a notable effort toward gender parity. Women poets like Warsan Shire, Safia Elhillo, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Momtaza Mehri, Tsitsi Jaji, and Vuyelwa Maluleke form a significant portion of the archive. This signals an important feminist shift in African poetics, with the chapbook form serving as a space where African women’s voices are nurtured and given international exposure, countering historical silences.
The birth years of poets in the series range from 1963 to 2007, showcasing a vibrant intergenerational dialogue. Older poets often engage in socio-political critique informed by post-independence transitions, while millennial and Gen Z poets explore themes of identity, queerness, internet culture, displacement, and decoloniality with linguistic experimentation and digital fluency.
Ghanaian poet Tryphena Yeboah, in her chapbookA Mouthful of Home, exemplifies this:
I TELL MY MOTHER I WANT A BODY THAT EXPANDS
Into a map. She wants to know where I’ll travel to.
I say “myself”.
The act of travel becomes a metaphor for self-mapping, capturing how younger African poets reimagine movement, belonging, and home as internal, affective geographies.
In contrast, South African poet Ashley Makue, in her chapbooki know how to fix myself, offers a more visceral expression of embodied trauma and inherited violence:
my mother is a war zone
they don’t tell her that
these men that pee in her
and leave with gunpowder in their chests
A Living Archive
The New Generation African Poets Chapbook Series has been an extraordinary intervention in the history of African poetry. It has foregrounded a generation, opened an aesthetic safe space, and created a beautiful, living archive.
Dawes and Abani introduce each of the box sets with two introductions—what they call “simultaneous conversations”—and often debate identity, the style of the poetry, circulation, and other issues.
This is more than an impressive catalogue; it is a breathing archive of African poetic consciousness, one that resists static definitions. It captures the fluidity of identity, the urgency of voice, and the diverse shaping of African poetry today.
What it tells us: that African poetry is thriving, diverse, and globally mobile. What it does not tell us: how poets working entirely from the continent might imagine and enact African poetics differently.
But by foregrounding new and emerging voices, the Africa Poetry Book Fund affirms that poets remain vital chroniclers of the African experience, articulating emotion, history, and imagination in ways that other forms of writing often cannot.
They don’t just do this through publications, but by running prizes, supporting African poetry libraries, and maintaining a digital archive.