Bayo Ojikutu

Last updated
Bayo Ojikutu
Bayo Ojikutu.jpg
BornBayo Olayinka Ojikutu
1971 (age 5253)
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Occupation
  • Writer
  • novelist
  • lecturer
NationalityNigerian-American
Alma mater University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Bayo Olayinka Ojikutu (born 1971) is a Nigerian-American creative writer, novelist and university lecturer.

His first novel, 47th Street Black (Crown, 2003), [1] [2] received the Washington Prize for Fiction and the Great American Book Award. Ojikutu's short fiction has appeared widely, including within the pages of the 2013 Akashic Press collection USA Noir and in the speculative fiction anthology Shadow Show. Ojikutu's short story, "Yayi and Those Who Walk on Water: A Fable", received a Special Mention nomination from the Pushcart Prize for outstanding fiction published in literary presses in 2009. By then, Three Rivers Press had released his second novel, Free Burning, to considerable critical acclaim . [3]

Ojikutu is a graduate of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has taught creative writing at the University of Chicago, DePaul University, and Roosevelt University.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Eugenides</span> American novelist and short story writer (born 1960)

Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of the 1999 film of the same name, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni</span> American professor, novelist, and poet (born 1956)

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-born American author, poet, and the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Her short story collection, Arranged Marriage, won an American Book Award in 1996. Two of her novels, as well as a short story were adapted into films.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Bergen</span> Canadian writer

David Bergen is a Canadian novelist. He has published eleven novels and two collections of short stories since 1993 and is currently based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. His 2005 novel The Time in Between won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and he was a finalist again in 2010 and 2020, making the long list in 2008.

Josip Novakovich is a Croatian Canadian writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jayne Anne Phillips</span> American writer

Jayne Anne Phillips is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer who was born in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Alley</span> American author and educator

Henry Alley is an American author and educator known for gay themes in his work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laila Lalami</span> Moroccan-American writer, and professor (born 1968)

Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.

Tod Goldberg is an American author and journalist best known for his novels Gangsters Don't Die (Counterpoint), Gangster Nation (Counterpoint), Gangsterland (Counterpoint) and Living Dead Girl, the popular Burn Notice series (Penguin/NAL) and the short story collection The Low Desert: Gangster Stories (Counterpoint).

Mark Winegardner is an American writer born and raised in Bryan, Ohio. His novels include The Godfather Returns, Crooked River Burning, and The Veracruz Blues. He published a collection of short stories, That's True of Everybody, in 2002. His newest novel, The Godfather's Revenge, was published in November 2006 by Putnam. His Godfather novels continue the story of the Corleone family depicted in Mario Puzo's The Godfather.

Peter Orner is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, two story collections and a book of essays. Orner holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and was formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He spent 2016 and 2017 on a Fulbright in Namibia teaching at the University of Namibia.

Jane Harris is a British writer of fiction and screenplays. Her novels have been published in over 20 territories worldwide and translated into many different languages. Her most recent work is the novel Sugar Money which has been shortlisted for several literary prizes.

Philip Graham is an American author, professor, and editor. He is one of the founders, and the current editor-at-large, of the literary/arts journal, Ninth Letter, which won the MLA’s Best New Literary Journal Award in 2005. He is a professor emeritus in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received three campus-wide teaching awards. He has also taught in the low-residency MFA program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Additionally, he is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two Illinois Arts Council grants, and the William Peden Prize in Fiction from The Missouri Review, as well as fellowship residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo artists' colony.

Floyd Skloot is an American poet, novelist, and memoirist. Some of his work concerns his experience with neurological damage caused by a virus contracted in 1988.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Roorbach</span> American novelist

William Roorbach is an American novelist, short story and nature writer, memoirist, journalist, blogger and critic. He has authored fiction and nonfiction works including Big Bend, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the O. Henry Prize. Roorbach's memoir in nature, Temple Stream, won the Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction, 2005. His novel, Life Among Giants, won the 2013 Maine Literary Award for Fiction.[18] And The Remedy for Love, also a novel, was one of six finalists for the 2014 Kirkus Fiction Prize. His book, The Girl of the Lake, is a short story collection published in June 2017. His most recent novel is Lucky Turtle, published in 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paula Morris</span> New Zealand writer

Paula Jane Kiri Morris is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer editor and literary academic. She is an associate professor at the University of Auckland and founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beth Ann Fennelly</span> American poet and writer

Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Farnoosh Moshiri</span>

Farnoosh Moshiri is an Iranian-born novelist, playwright, and librettist. She teaches creative writing and literature at University of Houston–Downtown. Moshiri has published five books of fiction: At the Wall of the Almighty, The Bathhouse, The Crazy Dervish and the Pomegranate Tree, Against Gravity, and The Drum Tower.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Howard Owen</span> American author (born 1949)

Howard Owen is an American author. He is a writer of literary fiction, mystery, and thrillers. He was the winner of the 2012 Hammett Prize awarded annually by the International Association of Crime Writers.

Alexandria Constantinova Szeman is an American author of literary fiction, poetry, true crime, memoir, and nonfiction. Her poetry and first three books were originally published under the pseudonym Sherri Szeman.

Julie Schumacher is an American novelist, essayist, short story writer and academic. She is a Regents Professor of Creative Writing and English at the University of Minnesota. Schumacher specializes in creative writing, contemporary fiction, and children's literature.

References

  1. "47TH STREET BLACK by Bayo Ojikutu". Kirkus Reviews. November 15, 2002. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
  2. Muyumba, Walton (June 22, 2003). "Good writing can't save tale of South Side gangsters". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 2017-08-11.
  3. "Fiction Book Review: Free Burning by Bayo Ojikutu, Author Three Rivers Press (CA) $13.95 (383p) ISBN 978-1-4000-8289-6". Kirkus reviews. August 1, 2006. Retrieved 2017-09-10.[ permanent dead link ]