Uche Nduka | |
---|---|
Birth name | Williams Uche Nduka |
Born | October 14, 1963 |
Occupation(s) | Poet, writer, lecturer |
Uche Nduka (born October 14, 1963) is a Nigerian-American poet, writer, lecturer and songwriter who was awarded the Association of Nigerian Authors Prize for Poetry in 1997. [1] He lives in New York City.
Uche Nduka was born in Nigeria to a Christian family. His birth name was Williams Uche Nduka, the "Africanization" of his name occurred after Dr. Juliet Okonkwo's particularly moving treatise on African "cultural nationalism". [2] Raised bilingual in Igbo and English, he earned his BA from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (in Enugu State, southeastern part of Nigeria) and his MFA from Long Island University, Brooklyn.
He left Nigeria in 1994 and settled in Germany after winning a fellowship from the Goethe Institute. He lived in Germany and the Netherlands for the next decade and immigrated to the United States in 2007.
Nduka's work is notable for its surrealist energy and political urgency. According to Joyelle McSweeney: "To my reading, all of Nduka's work is Surreal, and in this sense, it is all political. The real is not paraphrased or commented on by Surrealism but convulses through it. The real in Nduka's work carries the resonance not only of his Nigerian identity and experience of political violence but also the dislocation of the émigré and the frightening power relations of intimacy as mapped onto the lyric." [3] Nduka himself has said: "So far I just like doing my own thing and not buying into the hype of either formal or informal English; traditional or avant-garde usages. I enact a language style that suits my mood and the subjects I am interested in. Linguistically it seems there are a lot of trenches that have not been explored in poems/poetry. I keep attempting to investigate them. I don't want to feel like people expect me to write in English timidly." [4] Nduka currently lives in Brooklyn. He is a member of *Kristiania, a Brooklyn-based literary collective.
Nduka is the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose, including Nine East (2013), Ijele (2012), and eel on reef (2007), all of which were published after he arrived in the United States. Earlier collections include Heart's Field (2005); If Only the Night (2002); Chiaroscuro (1997), which won the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize; The Bremen Poems (1995); Second Act (1994); and Flower Child (1988). Belltime Letters (2000) is a collection of prose. [5]
The Objectivist poets were a loose-knit group of second-generation Modernists who emerged in the 1930s. They were mainly American and were influenced by, among others, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The basic tenets of objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky were to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasize sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world. While the name of the group is similar to Ayn Rand's school of philosophy, the two movements are not affiliated.
Flarf poetry was an avant-garde poetry movement of the early 21st century. The term flarf was coined by the poet Gary Sullivan, who also wrote and published the earliest Flarf poems. Its first practitioners, working in loose collaboration on an email mailing list, used an approach that rejected conventional standards of quality and explored subject matter and tonality not typically considered appropriate for poetry. One of their central methods, invented by Drew Gardner, was to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into humorous or disturbing poems, plays and other texts.
Michael Rothenberg was an American poet, songwriter, editor, artist, and environmentalist. Born in Miami Beach, Florida, Rothenberg received his Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He moved to California in 1976, where he began "Shelldance Orchid Gardens", an orchid and bromeliad nursery. In 2016, Rothenberg moved to Tallahassee, Florida where he was Florida State University Libraries Poet in Residence.
Christopher Abani is a Nigerian American and Los Angeles- based author. He says he is part of a new generation of Nigerian writers working to convey to an English-speaking audience the experience of those born and raised in "that troubled African nation".
Amatoritsero "Godwin" Ede is a Nigerian-Canadian poet. He had written under the name "Godwin Ede" but he stopped bearing his Christian first name as a way to protest the xenophobia and racism he noted in Germany, a "Christian" country, and to an extent, to protest Western colonialism in general. Ede has lived in Canada since 2002, sponsored as a writer-in-exile by PEN Canada. He was a Hindu Monk with the Hare Krishna Movement, and has worked as a Book Editor with a major Nigerian trade publisher, Spectrum Books.
Chike C. Aniakor is a Nigerian artist, art historian, author, and poet whose work addresses philosophical, political, and religious themes relating to Igbo society and the Nigerian Civil War. His artworks are held in major metropolitan museums including the Smithsonian Institution, Nigerian National Gallery of Art, and the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Frankfurt. Aniakor is a prolific writer and has authored over 75 books and articles.
Vincent Chukwuemeka Ike OFR, NNOM was a Nigerian monarch, academic and writer known for a mixture of lampoon, humour and satire. He owed a little bit of his style to his Igbo cultural upbringing. He studied history, English and Religious Studies at the University of Ibadan and earned a master's degree at Stanford University. Among many of the first generation of Nigerian writers, he was popular as the author of Expo '77, a critical look at academic examination abuses in West Africa. Ike was a former registrar of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC).
Tanure Ojaide is a Nigerian poet and academic. As a writer, he is noted for his unique stylistic vision and for his intense criticism of imperialism, religion, and other issues. He is regarded as a socio-political and an ecocentric poet. He won the 2018 Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa with his collection Songs of Myself: A Quartet (2017).
Joyelle McSweeney is a poet, playwright, novelist, critic, and professor at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include Toxicon & Arachne (2021) from Nightboat Books, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014) from University of Michigan Press, Salamandrine: 8 gothics (2013) and Nylund, the Sarcographer (2007), both from Tarpaulin Sky Press, as well as Percussion Grenade (2012), Flet (2007), The Commandrine and Other Poems (2004), and The Red Bird (2001), the latter four published by Fence Books. In addition to her books, she has published two plays; Dead Leaks, or, the Youths performed by Runaway Labs Theater in 2017, and The Contagious Knives performed at JumpStart Festival for New Writing. Her translations of Yi Sang: Selected Works (2020) were published alongside Don Mee Choi, Jack Jung, and Sawako Nakayasu by Wave Books. Her reviews appear at The Constant Critic and elsewhere, and her poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Poetry magazine, Octopus Magazine,GultCult, and Tarpaulin Sky, among other places. Along with her husband Johannes Göransson, she is the founder of Action Books which has published a number of contemporary authors including Lara Glenum, Tao Lin, Arielle Greenberg, and Hiromi Itō. She graduated from Harvard College as well as MPhil, Oxford University; MFA University of Iowa Writers Workshop.
Chad Sweeney is an American poet, translator and editor.
Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma is a Nepalese-Indian poet and journalist. He was born at Nakodar, Punjab and moved to Nepal at an early age. He writes in English and Nepali.
Jephthah Elochukwu Unaegbu is a Nigerian writer, researcher, freelance journalist, actor, and documentary film maker.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Echezonachukwu Chinedu Nduka is a Nigerian poet, pianist, author, recording artist, and ethnomusicologist specializing in piano music by West African composers. His work has been featured on BBC, Radio Nacional Clasica de Argentina, Radio France International (rfi), and Classical Journey.
Unoma Azuah is a Nigerian writer, author, and activist whose research and activism focus on LGBT writing in Nigerian literature. She has published three books, two of which have won international awards. She focuses on issues relating to queer Nigerians, such as in Blessed Body: Secret Lives of LGBT Nigerians (2016).
Sara María Uribe Sánchez is a Mexican poet. Her poems have appeared in periodicals and anthologies in Mexico, Peru, Spain, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Patrick Rosal is a Filipino American poet and essayist.
Obi Nwakanma is a Nigerian poet, literary critic, journalist and academic at University of Central Florida. He writes a regular Sunday column on Vanguard Newspaper called The Orbit. His works have also appeared in The Punch, ThisDay and TheCable.
Wreaths for a Wayfarer: An Anthology in Honour of Pius Adesanmi is a 2020 collection of poems edited by Uche Peter Umez and Nduka Otiono in honour of Pius Adesanmi (1972–2019). It was published by Daraja Press in North America and Narrative Landscape Press in Nigeria.
Nduka Anthony Otiono is a Nigerian-Canadian professor, writer, poet, and a journalist. He is the Director, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada and his multidisciplinary research addresses how street stories —popular urban narratives in postcolonial Africa—travel through many cultural formations, such as oral tradition, the press, movies, popular songs, and social networks.