The 2017 international Brunel poetry prize shortlists will be announced tomorrow March 6th 2017. The Brunel prize for poetry is the African poetry prize that spots new talents every year on the African continent and the diaspora, and is composed of several eminent luminary poets drawn from across the globe. According to the site “The winner,” will be “announced on May 2nd 2017. The Brunel International African Poetry Prize is a major annual poetry prize of £3000 aimed at the development, celebration and promotion of poetry from Africa. Now in its fourth year, this year the Prize is sponsored by Brunel University and Commonwealth Writers.” below are this year judges:
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Judges 2017
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Chair and Founder: Bernardine Evaristo
British-Nigerian writer Bernardine Evaristo is the award-winning author of seven books of fiction and verse fiction including Mr Loverman, Lara, The Emperor’s Babe and Blonde Roots. She is a literary critic and an editor of anthologies and special magazine issues such as guest-editing Poetry Review in its centenary year. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London. She has judged and chaired many leading literary awards and in 2012 was Chair of both the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and The Caine Prize for African Fiction. She has won several literary awards and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2004, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2006 and she was awarded an MBE in 2009. www.bevaristo.com. As an advocate for poets of colour, she initiated the Arts Council Free Verse report (2006) and The Complete Works (ongoing from 2008, led by Dr. Nathalie Teitler) mentoring scheme to address the (under 1%) representation of poets of colour in British poetry presses and to develop poets of colour to publication, with Spread the Word, London’s premier writer development agency, which she co-founded in 1995. Many of the former mentees are publishing full-length poetry collections with leading poetry publishers and have won or been nominated for many awards, including winning the prestigious Forward Prize 2014 for best first collection (Mona Arshi) and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award 2015 (Sarah Howe). Former mentee and first BIAPP winner, Warsan Shire, collaborated with Beyonce on her latest album, Lemonade (2016), which features many of Warsan’s poems.
Chris Abani
Chris Abani is an acclaimed novelist and poet. His most recent books are The Secret History of Las Vegas, The Face: A Memoir and Sanctificum. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, An Edgar Prize, A Ford USA Artists Fellowship, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, a Prince Claus Award, the Hurston Wright Legacy Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honours. Born in Nigeria, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Board of Trustees Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He lives in Chicago. http://www.chrisabani.com
Kwame Dawes
Ghanaian-Jamaican writer Kwame Dawes is the award-winning author of twenty-one books of poetry and numerous books of fiction, non-fiction, criticism and drama. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a faculty member of the Pacific MFA program in Oregon. His many awards include the Forward Prize, an Emmy for his reporting on HIV AIDS in Jamaica, the Barnes and Nobles Writers for Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is Associate Poetry Editor of Peepal Tree Press and co-founder and Program Director of Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica. His collection Duppy Conqueror, New and Selected Poems was published by Copper Canyon in 2013. http://www.kwamedawes.com/ In 2012 Kwame founded the African Poetry Book Foundation which incorporates the new Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and a host of other literary projects. Kwame works with Bernardine Evaristo on judging of each other’s prizes and locating the brightest new voices in African poetry. http://africanpoetrybf.unl.edu/
Safia Elhillo
Safia Elhillo’s first full-length collection, The January Children, is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in 2017. Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, and a Cave Canem fellow, she received a BA from New York University and an MFA in poetry at the New School. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee, co-winner of the 2015 Brunel University African Poetry Prize, and winner of the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. In addition to appearing in several journals and anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, her work has been translated into Arabic and Greek. For more information visit:
http://safia-mafia.com/bio
Patricia Jabbeh Welsley
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a Liberian civil war survivor who immigrated to the United States with her family in 1991 during the fourteen year Liberian civil war. She is the author of five books of poetry, When the Wanderers Come Home, Where the Road Turns, The River is Rising, Becoming Ebony, Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa, and one children’s book, In Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea. Her poem, “One Day: Love Song for Divorced Women” was selected by US Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser, as an American Life in Poetry June 13, 2011 featured poem. Patricia has won several awards and grants, including a 2016 WISE Women Award from Blair County, Pennsylvania, 2011 President Award from the Blair County NAACP, and a 2002 Crab Orchard Award for her second book of poems. Her individual poems and memoir articles have been widely anthologised in the US and around the world. She is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State University’s Altoona campus. culled from http://www.africanpoetryprize.org/
Main Pic : Warsan Shire, first winner of the Prize in 2013