TBLNG Press has announced the acquisition of West African rights to This Is How We Disappear, the poetry collection by Titilope Sonuga. A cover reveal and release date are promised soon.

The collection, first published in 2019, begins with the Chibok school kidnappings in Sonuga’s native Nigeria and follows what the press calls the often brutal journey from girlhood to womanhood. Along the way, it traces survival, inherited resilience, and the joy that persists in difficult terrain. In the announcement, the poet Rachel McKibbens describes the poems as a cartographer of survival, mapping a lineage of resilience and joy through the defiant matriarchs of Sonuga’s bloodline, women “blooming on barren land.”

“At TBLNG Press, we believe that books matter not only because of the stories they tell, but also because of the conversations they make possible,” the press wrote. It describes the project as one to look forward to.

Sonuga is a poet, playwright, and performer whose work has been taken to stages across the world. Born in Lagos, she moved to Edmonton, Alberta, at 13 and trained as a civil engineer, working on the city’s 23rd Avenue Interchange project before poetry took over. In 2009 she founded the Breath In Poetry Collective and a weekly poetry night. Her first collection, Down to Earth, and the spoken-word album Mother Tongue followed in 2011. That year she won the Canadian Authors Association Emerging Writer Award, and in 2012 she won the Maya Angelou Poetry Contest. Abscess followed in 2014, then This Is How We Disappear in 2019.

Her theatre credits include The Six, Naked, and Ada the Country, and she wrote and produced Open, an interdisciplinary spoken-word show that played to sold-out audiences in Edmonton, Calgary, London, Johannesburg, Abuja, and Lagos. She has also worked on global campaigns with the World Health Organization, Google, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 2021, Sonuga became the ninth Poet Laureate of Edmonton, serving until 2023. TBLNG’s announcement also notes that she was the first poet to perform at a Nigerian presidential inauguration. Hope and healing run through all of it, and her laureate project, Cathedral of Tenderness, collected stories of hope from Edmontonians.

For TBLNG Press, which describes itself as a “disruptive intervention in African publishing” with a focus on fresh, contemporary voices, the acquisition brings a decorated poet’s work closer to home readers. This Is How We Disappear is the kind of book that West African readers can now look forward to holding.