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2026 Classes
• 2026 Classes
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2026 Instructors
• 2026 Instructors
TITILOPE SONUGA is an award-winning poet, playwright, and performer. Her poetry concert Open has shown to sold-out audiences worldwide. She has published three poetry collections: Down to Earth (2011), Abscess (2014), and This Is How We Disappear (2019), and has released three spoken-word albums: Mother Tongue (2011), Swim (2019), and Sis (2024). She was nominated for a Dora Award for Outstanding New Opera for her play Sankofa. She was the first poet to perform at a Nigerian presidential inauguration and was Edmonton’s 9th Poet Laureate.
BWESIGYE BWA-MWESIGIRE is an assistant professor of Global African Literatures and Cultures at California State University - Dominguez Hills. He started the Writivism Literary Initiative, which offered prizes, ran creative writing workshops, facilitated online mentoring, published anthologies, and curated a festival in Kampala between 2013 and 2019.
GLORIA MWANIGA ODARY is a writer and educator from Kenya, with an MFA from the University of Memphis, where she was Managing Editor of The Pinch Literary Journal. Odary is fascinated by historical revisionism and the intersection between research and imagination. Odary was a finalist for the 2026-2027 Steinbeck Fellows Program, and a recipient of the 2024 Georgia Review Prose Prize, the 2024 Isele Nonfiction Prize, the 2021 African Land Policy Centre Story Prize, and a Miles Morland Writing Scholarship. Her essay, A Kenyan Woman’s Musings on Tea and the Empire, is forthcoming from Transition. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Isele, Lolwe, Olongo Africa, Weganda Review, The White Review, Porter House Review, CRAFT, and elsewhere.
OLAJIDE SALAWU is a Canada-based Nigerian scholar and poet. He is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland, published under the African Poetry Book Fund; the co-editor of African Urban Echoes, published by Griots Lounge Canada; and Contraband Bodies, published by NeWest Press. His individual poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Walrus, Poetry Pause, Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Transition, and so on. Salawu has won multiple fellowships and awards, including the Andrew Mellon Fellowship, the Yosef Wosk Fellowship, the Fulbright Scholarship, and so on. He is currently a Black postdoctoral scholar in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario.
BILL GAYTHWAITE is the author of Underburn, a novel published by Delphinium Books/HarperCollins. His short story collection A Place in the World, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, won the 2025 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the Foreword INDIES Gold Medal Award for Short Fiction. Bill’s short stories have appeared in Subtropics, Chicago Quarterly Review, Willow Springs, South Carolina Review, Puerto del Sol, and many other publications.
AJIBOLA TOLASE is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He is the author of 2000 Blacks, winner of the 2024 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and 2024 Florida Book Award Gold Medal in poetry. He is a former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University, and has received a creative writing grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. He lives in Florida.