Nigerian poet Gbenga Adesina has been featured in Poets & Writers magazine’s 21st annual celebration of debut poets for his collection Death Does Not End at the Sea, published by the University of Nebraska Press. The recognition places Adesina alongside nine other poets whose first books represent fresh voices reshaping contemporary poetry. The magazine will host two-night readings with the featured authors on January 20 and 21, 2026.

Adesina’s debut collection grapples with migration, loss, and the Mediterranean’s role as both grave and passage for African migrants. The title itself challenges finality, suggesting how death reverberates beyond physical boundaries into memory, politics, and collective consciousness. His work emerges from a tradition of African poets engaging with displacement and the ongoing crises of migration, bringing lyrical precision to landscapes marked by tragedy.

In his interview with Poets & Writers, Adesina reveals that the book was haunted by “two kinds of journeys”—his father’s abrupt death and his own departure from Nigeria to the United States. He questions how grief mutates across borders: “How do you grieve what you left behind? Is fatherlessness the spiritual cousin of nationlessness?” The collection took eight to nine years to complete, with the oldest poem written in 2016 and the most recent in 2024.

The 36-year-old poet, who teaches at the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, describes his approach to writer’s block as addressing spiritual estrangement rather than mere impasse. He advocates for what he calls “the discipline of visionary aimlessness”—giving oneself to language work where “the reward originates and is spent within the universe of the work.” His influences range from Wole Soyinka’s plays to Aracelis Girmay, Lokua Kanza, and Cesária Évora, who “taught me that a voice can be full of oceans.”

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