Event: Brunel Prize Winner Gbenga Adesina in Conversation with Pulitzer Prize Winner Tyehimba Jess

Gbenga Adesina, winner of the 2016 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, will be in conversation with Tyehimba Jess, Professor of English at College of Staten Island and author of Olio, which received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and with R.A. Villanueva, author of Reliquaria, which won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. The event is organised by Pete’s Big Salmon and will be held in Pete’s Candy Store, Brooklyn, New York.

Brittle Paper is fiercely proud of the heights hit by Gbenga Adesina since we first published his work in 2014, a brief, beautiful poem titled “Rediscovery.” By co-winning the Brunel Prize in 2016—alongside Chekwube Danladi—he became the first Brittle Paper-published writer of the new generation to take home a continental award—a list which has since swelled in 2017.

His chapbook, Painter of Water, was included in Tatu, the 2016 edition of New-Generation African Poets chapbook box set series, an initiative of the Africa Poetry Book Fund edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. His poem, “How To Paint a Girl,” was selected by Mathew Zapruder for The New York Times Magazine in July 2016, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Brittle Paper Award for Poetry. His manuscript Holy Bodies was a finalist for the 2017 Sillerman First Book Prize from the African Poetry Book Fund.

His poems and interviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Washington Square Review, Vinyl, Ploughshares and elsewhere. A 2017 Emerging Poets Fellow at Poets House in New York City, he has received other fellowships and scholarships from the Norman Mailer Center, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop at Oxford University, and the 2015 poets’ residency on Goree Island organized by the Open Society Initiative for West Africa. Born in Nigeria, he is currently a Starworks Poetry Fellow in the MFA program at New York University.

Find out more HERE.