Spring 2022
#ObsidianVoices
Celebrating artistic excellence in the African Diaspora online and beyond!
Join us for our first Spring 2022 #ObsidianVoices event:
- JAN 28 @ 6PM CT – Whirlwind, a celebration of the Furious Flower Poetry Prize winning and honorable mention poetry, selected by judge Kei Miller, published in Obsidian’s Radiance special issue 46.2 FEATURING Diamond Forde and Kweku Abimbola. Moderated by Lauren K. Alleyne.
- FEB 11 @ 6PM CT – Black Futures, a celebration of Obsidian’s 47.1 issue with a reading and conversation FEATURING Trace DePass, Aris Kian, MARS Marshall, Olufunke Ogundimu & Ronda Racha Penrice. Moderated by Sheree Renée Thomas and Nandi Comer.
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About the Artists
#ObsidianVoices January 28, 2022
Kweku Abimbola is a post-graduate Zell Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He is of Gambian, Ghanaian, and Sierra Leonean descent. He is a finalist for the 2021 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, the second-place winner of Furious Flower’s 2020 poetry contest, and has work published and forthcoming in Shade Literary Arts, 20.35 Africa, The Common, Obsidian, Sunu Journal, and elsewhere. Kweku is presently working on his first full-length poetry manuscript entitled “Saltwater Demands a Psalm,” where he investigates colonization, black mourning, black boyhood, gender politics, and the spiritual consequences of climate change in West Africa. His chapbook, Birth Elegies, is forthcoming in May 2022. You can find him on Twitter: @kwxkuu.
#ObsidianVoices January 28, 2022
Moderator
Lauren K. Alleyne is the award-winning author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (2014) and Honeyfish (2019), and is co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2020). Alleyne was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, and currently lives in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where she is a professor of English at James Madison University, and the assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center.
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Issue 46.2: The First Born
To read more from Obsidian 46.2, please link to our Subscribe page
Issue 46.2: On the Honorable Mention Poems by Kweku Abimbola
ON THE HONORABLE MENTION POEMSBY KWEKU ABIMBOLA Kei Miller, JudgeGrowing up in the kind of place that often experiences power cuts, it has occurred to me before how these outages often create intimacy, a time when families draw closer. I have never thought to write...
Issue 46.2: On the Winning Poems by Diamond Forde
ON THE WINNING POEMS BY DIAMOND FORDE Kei Miller, JudgeImpressive here is the way these poems first lean into and then away from creation mythologies. They choose to dig their own ground, in the process inventing new mythologies, sometimes with startling new images: a...