Online festival

All poets
World Poetry Day
Sub-Saharan Africa hub curators
Tony Mochama
Tony Mochama
Tony Mochama is a lawyer-turned-journalist who works with the Standard Newspapers in Kenya, and runs a small consultancy Media Ace Partners. He is also a popular poet & spoken word artist in East Africa. Tony is the Sec. Gen of PEN International, the Kenya chapter. He is published ten books, three in his favourite poetry genre – ‘What If I’m A Literary Gangsta?’ (2007), ‘In the City of Water’ (2019) and ‘Modern Poetry for Secondary Schools’ (2016), a book officially recommended in Kenyan high schools to ‘demystify’ the art of poetry to students of literature. Originally a beneficiary of the Summer Literary Seminars (SLS). Participant of multiple events: from Canada’s Concordia University in 2011 to being poet-in-residence at Ca’Foscari University in Venice (2013), Bayreuth University in Germany (2014), as well as the sub-Saharan poet rep at the BIG SAS in Germany and Disquiet International literary festival in Portugal.The Goethe also selected Tony in mid-2019 to go and run a weeklong poetry festival in Namibia. Locally, under the umbrella of PEN Intl, Tony has helped set up ‘PEN Poetry clubs’ across the country, and won the Sanaa Theater Poet of the Year (2014) and three national Burt Prizes. Mochama was also the pioneer winner of the continental Miles Morland Scholarship Award, and was an Emily Harvey Foundation (EHF) poet-in-residence, 2019.
Nii Ayikwei Parkes
Nii Ayikwei Parkes
Nii Ayikwei Parkes. A 2007 recipient of Ghana’s ACRAG award, Nii Ayikwei Parkes is a writer, editor and socio-cultural commentator. He is the author of the hybrid novel, Tail of the Blue Bird, which is translated into Dutch, German , Spanish, French, Italian, Catalan and Japanese. Nii Ayikwei's début book of poetry, The Makings of You (Peepal Tree) includes the poem Barter, which was used in the 2013 Poems on the Underground London series, and his recent second, The Geez (Peepal Tree) is a UK Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was longlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize. Following roles at the University of Southampton, California State University and the University of Aberystwyth, he was founding director of the Aidoo Centre for Creative Writing in Accra, before taking his current role as Producer of Literature and Talks at Brighton Festival. Nii Ayikwei writes for children under the name K. P. Kojo and was selected as one of Africa's 39 most promising authors of the new generation for the World Book Capital Africa 39 Project in 2014. He splits his time between Ghana and Europe, where he produces literature events and teaches.
Poets