A new essay collection on African writers and artificial intelligence is taking shape, and a first look at its roster is now available. Titled Promptings: African Literature in the AI Conjuncture, the volume is being edited by James Yékú, Associate Professor of African Digital Humanities at the University of Kansas. The title is still a working one, and the project itself is still in motion, with the line-up and contents liable to shift before the book is complete.

Those who have committed to contributing include Emmanuel Iduma, winner of the 2022 Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction; Mubanga Kalimamukwento, the first Zambian writer to win the Drue Heinz Literature Prize; Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, winner of the NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature; Tanure Ojaide, recipient of the Nigerian National Order of Merit; and Juliane Okot Bitek, winner of the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Gibson Ncube, Janet Remmington, Tolu Daniel, Kola Tubosun, and the South African historical novelist Mphuthumi Ntabeni are also on board, among others. Nigerian novelist Helon Habila has agreed to write the foreword. Brittle Paper’s founder and editor, Ainehi Edoro, will also contribute an essay. In all, nearly thirty writers and scholars are involved, writing across genres from the continent and its diaspora.

At the center of the book is its title word. Yékú invites contributors to follow “promptings” through its many meanings: what comes to mind when we hear “AI,” and what the machine in turn calls up in us. For writers who work with AI tools, the question is how they prompt them, and whether prompting can become a means of narrative sovereignty and creative reclamation. For those who refuse the tools, it is what drives that refusal, and whether it springs from a conviction that AI is fundamentally at odds with the writing life. Beneath both lies a harder question: can we trust our own prompts?

The collection is conceived as a work of creative nonfiction and public humanities, centering the voices of African writers alongside a handful of scholars. Its contributors write from West, East, Southern, and North Africa and from the diaspora, an assembly meant to enact the plurality the book argues for and to push back against the habit, in conversations about AI, of treating the continent as a single story.

The proposal is currently under review at the University of Michigan Press. As the project develops, Brittle Paper will keep you posted.