We are excited to reveal the captivating cover for Michael Imossan’s debut full-length poetry collection All That Refuses to Die. The book, winner of the 2024 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press on March 1, 2026, as part of the African Poetry Book Series.

Imossan’s winning manuscript was selected by a distinguished judging panel consisting of Chris Abani, Gabeba Baderoon, Aracelis Girmay, John Keene, Matthew Shenoda, Mahtem Shiferraw, and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, with Kwame Dawes, Director of the African Poetry Book Fund and Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner.

Award-winning poet, Gabeba Baderoon praised the collection’s “exquisite language, piercingly memorable lines [are] elegiac but with an insistence on beauty and love.”

Poet Fady Joudah, author of The Earth in the Attic and Tethered to Stars, offers high praise for Imossan’s work:

“Michael Imossan is a capacious poet. He shows us how a heart can take in an entire continent and spread it as love to the world. His collective heart is perhaps the most interior heart and most true.”

Michael Imossan is an Ibibio poet from Nigeria. He is the author of the award-winning chapbook For the Love of Country and Memory (Poetrycolumnnd, 2022),which won the Nigerian News Direct Poetry Prize, The Smell of Absence  (2025) and the pamphlet, A Prelude to Caving (Konyashamsrumi, 2023). His work explores themes of family, country, self-realization, love, and nature. He has been nominated for the Forward Prizes for Poetry, Best of the Net, and Pushcart Prize, and is a recipient of the PEN International Writers Grant.

With this win, Imossan becomes the twelfth poet to receive the Sillerman Prize and joins fellow Nigerian poets Tares Oburumu (Origins of the Syma Species, 2022), Abu Bakr Sadiq (Leaked Footages, 2023), and Gbenga Adeoba (EXODUS, 2019) in winning this prestigious prize, marking a remarkable three-year winning streak for Nigerian poets.

All That Refuses to Die is now available for pre-order from the University of Nebraska Press.

Enjoy the beautiful cover as you wait for the publication!