Toward a Living Archive of African Poetry

Authors: Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani

Editor: Siwar Masannat

Publisher: Akashic Books (2025)

Toward a Living Archive of African Poetry collects the introductory essays of the New-Generation African Poetry chapbook box sets written by editors Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. Celebrating ten years of their dedication to publishing chapbooks by emerging African poets, this volume offers a glimpse into Abani and Dawes’s editorial labor and conceptualization of an inclusive African poetic. Here is African poetry as capacious transnational phenomenon; as polyvocal, linguistically layered journey; as intergenerational conversation; as grappling with traditions and futures in the present tense of modernity; and much more.