Colgate University, New York, has honored US-based Nigerian poet and professor of poetry, Gbenga Adesina, by hosting him to a reading and celebration of his works.
Organized by the 200-hundred-year-old university’s English Department, the event was hosted by Professor Jennifer Brice, an award winning writer and essayist, and Professor Peter Balakian, Pulitzer Prize winning poet and New York Times best selling author.
Professor Peter Balakian, in his introduction described Gbenga Adesina as ‘one of the most compelling young voices of his generation, a poet whose work spans continents in scope, and a masterful teacher’. One of the programs of The English department is the prestigious Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in which a young poet and writer who has done significant work is selected out of over a thousand applications to receive a fellowship to complete a first book and serve as a visiting professor in the English department. Gbenga Adesina won this prestigious fellowship in the 2019-2020 academic session.
According to Gbenga Adesina, “My time in this historic American institution which has been in existence for over two centuries will always stay with me. My experience teaching a diverse body of students who came from every part of the country and the world was an education for me. I also learned a great deal from my mentors who were some of the best minds and writers in the world.”
At the event, the renowned young poet read from his body work: ‘I Carried My Father Across the Sea’, which was part of his long sequence writing that won the Narrative Prize, and his poem, ‘Glory’, which was originally published in Academy of American Poets’s website and has been translated into over 10 languages and syndicated across major platforms in the United States, Europe, and Canada.
The event also included testimonials by his students, and engagements with members of the university community.
“Though forms and rules have their value, prof Adesina showed me that beautiful poetry can be fluid and free,” said Ashley Bound, a student in Adesina’s class, themed ‘Song of The Human’.
According to Bound, “Prof Adesina made poetry accessible to us by showing us we could relate not only to the poets we studied but also with the poets whom we sat across the table from.”
Gbenga Adesina is a renowned poet, essayist, and a PhD candidate in Florida State University. He has a Masters in Fine Arts (in poetry) from the prestigious New York University (NYU). In 2016, he became the first Nigerian to win the Brunel International Poetry Prize and first African based on the continent to win the prize. That same year, his poem was published in the New York Times and syndicated in several magazines and platforms. Three years later, he became the 2019-2020 Olive B. O’Connor Poetry Fellow at Colgate University.
He won the Narrative Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world, in 2020, for his poem, ‘Across the Sea: A Sequence’. Past winners of the prize have gone ahead to win Pulitzer Prizes, Guggenheim Fellowships, and the MacArthur Genius Grant. That same year, Adesina was a lead performer in the literary series, ‘Boundless: Africa’ hosted by the Kennedy Centre for Performing Arts in Washington DC. He featured alongside renowned African writers such as Ella Wakatama, Helon Habila, Jenifer Makumbi, Femi Osofisan, and the Booker Prize winning novelist, Ben Okri.
His work has been published in Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, Yale Review, Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day, the New York Times, and elsewhere
