African Diaspora Heritage and Experience Exhibit

Tomi Adeyemi is a Nigerian-American author and creative writing coach. Adeyemi was born in the United States after her parents emigrated from Nigeria. She grew up detached from her culture which made her very curious and it would later greatly influence her first two novels. Children of Blood and Bone is the first book in the trilogy The Legacy of Orïsha. It tells the story of a young girl named Zelie who lost her mother in a brutal massacre that caused the disappearance of Magic in the kingdom of Orïsha. Zelie goes on a journey with her brother Tzain and the escaped princess Amari to restore magic to the land and save the oppressed clans. Adeyemi creates a fictional world that addresses a lot of the issues we see today while telling an incredible story. Children of blood and bone won the 2018 Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy, the 2019 Waterstones Book Prize, and the 2019 Hugo Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book. Tomi Adeyemi has also been named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list as well as to the TIME 100 Most Influential People of 2020 in the "Pioneers" category.

Lesley Nneka Arimah is an Anglo-Nigerian author who grew up both in the UK and Nigeria, but also moved to the various places her father was stationed. She later moved to the United States where she received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Minnesota State University Mankato. What It Means When a Man Falls From The Sky is a collection of short stories that primarily focuses on women and girls but also discusses different family dynamics and relations. Arimah’s boldness and creativity shines through her stories as they range from fantasy to realism. What It Means When a Man Falls From The Sky won the 2017 Kirkus Prize, the 2017 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was selected for the New York Times/PBS book club among other honors. Arimah was the recipient of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and an O. Henry Award, and she was named a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Writing.

Daughters of Africa is a monumental achievement because it is the most comprehensive international anthology of oral and written literature by women of African descent ever attempted. The anthology is exhaustive in scope and expansive in voice because it encompasses authors from the Caribbean, North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia and translations from African, French, German, Dutch, Russian, and Turkish languages. Each story, whether fiction, nonfiction, memoir, or poem, is a singular experience. Here, together, is the clear, concise voice of Gwendolyn Brooks; the forceful presence of Sojourner Truth; the rhythmically of Nikki Giovanni; the sly, taunting voice of Toni Cade Bambara; the straight talk of Terry McMillan; the commanding presence of Angela Davis; the rhythmic dialect of Una Marson; the jazzy vernacular of Sonia Sanchez; the vision of Octavia E. Butler; and the careful, direct prose of Billie Holliday. Each story is enhanced by a succinctly informative history of the author's life and work. The success of the collection is that it clearly illustrates why all women of African descent are connected by showing how closely related are the obstacles, the chasms of cultural indifference, and the disheartening racial and sexual dilemmas they faced. In so doing, the collection captures the range of their singular and combined accomplishments. Daughters of Africa's accomplishment lies in its glorious portrayal of the richness and magnitude of the spiritual well from which we've all drawn inspiration and to where we've all gone from, sustenance, and as such, it is a stunning literary masterpiece.

Continues the work established in editor's 1992 anthology, "Daughters of Africa : an international anthology of words and writings by women of African descent from the ancient Egyptian to the present". "Twenty-five years ago, Margaret Busby's Daughters of Africa was published to international acclaim and hailed as "an extraordinary body of achievement . . . a vital document of lost history" (Sunday Times) and "the ultimate reference guide" (Washington Post). New Daughters of Africa continues that tradition for a new generation. This magnificent follow-up to the original landmark anthology brings together fresh and vibrant voices that have emerged from across the globe in the past two decades, from Antigua to Zimbabwe and Angola to the United States. Key figures, including Margo Jefferson, Nawal El Saadawi, Edwidge Danticat, and Zadie Smith, join popular contemporaries such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Imbolo Mbue, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Taiye Selasi, and Chinelo Okparanta in celebrating the heritage that unites them. Each of the pieces in this remarkable collection demonstrates an uplifting sense of sisterhood, honors the strong links that endure from generation to generation, and addresses the common obstacles female writers of color face as they negotiate issues of race, gender, and class and address vital matters of independence, freedom, and oppression. A glorious portrayal of the richness, magnitude, and range of these visionary writers, New Daughters of Africa spans a range of genres--autobiography, memoir, oral history, letters, diaries, short stories, novels, poetry, drama, humor, politics, journalism, essays, and speeches--demonstrating the diversity and extraordinary literary achievements of black women who remain underrepresented, and whose contributions continue to be underrated in world culture today.

Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American novelist, photographer, and art historian. He was born in the U.S but moved to Nigeria shortly after his birth. He moved back to the US at 17 and later went on to earn a doctorate in art history from Columbia University. Open City sees the main character Julius walking around New York City and taking in his surroundings. On his walk, Julius interacts with different types of people, many of whom are immigrants like himself who is Nigerian and German. Cole’s thoughtful writing guides us through Julius’ mind as we experience his feelings and reflections about himself as well as the city and life around him. Open City won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the New York City Book Award for Fiction. Additionally, Cole is a photography critic and the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University.

Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-American novelist and short story writer. Danticat was raised by her uncle and aunt as her parents had emigrated to the United States when she was still young. She started writing as early as 9 years of age, and at 12, she moved to Brooklyn, New York. Danticat has written several books including Krik? Krak!, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, and Breath, Eyes, Memory which follows a young Haitian girl named Sophie. At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti—to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary debut, Danticat evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti—and the enduring strength of Haiti’s women—with vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people’s suffering and courage. Breath, Eyes, Memory was selected for Oprah’s Book Club and helped Danticat win Granta Magazine’s Best Young American Novelists Award. She is also a 2009 MacArthur fellow, a 2018 Ford Foundation “The Art of Change” fellow, and the winner of the 2018 Neustadt International Prize and the 2019 St. Louis Literary Award.

Akwaeke Emezi is a Nigerian Igbo and Tamil writer and video artist. Raised in Aba, Nigeria, Emezi started writing stories as early as 5 years old amid the difficult atmosphere of the country at the time. Emezi later relocated to the United States, where they are now permanently based. Freshwater is rooted in Emezi’s life and Igbo heritage as a an Ogbanje: “an Igbo spirit that’s born into a human body, a kind of malevolent trickster, whose goal is to torment the human mother by dying unexpectedly only to return in the next child and do it all over again. They come and go.” Ada, the main character of the book, is also an ogbanje. She is a Nigerian woman living with fragmented selves within her and watches as they grow to take control over her. Freshwater won the 2019 Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree) and the Nommo Award. Additionally, it was named a New York Times Notable Book. Akwaeke Emezi was named one of The New Hollywood Guard: Writers by Vanity Fair as well as an honoree for the National Book Foundation’s '5 Under 35'.

Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born and bred in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney, London, for years. A flamboyant character with a fondness for William Shakespeare, Barrington is a husband, father, grandfather--and also secretly gay. With an abundance of laugh-out-loud humor and wit, Mr. Loverman explodes cultural myths and shows the extent of what can happen when people fear the consequences of being true to themselves. His deeply religious and disappointed wife, Carmel, thinks he sleeps with other women. When their marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away? With an abundance of laugh-out-loud humor and wit, Mr. Loverman explodes cultural myths and shows the extent of what can happen when people fear the consequences of being true to themselves.

Imbolo Mbue is a novelist and short-story writer born and raised in Cameroon until she moved to the United States for her higher education. Mbue’s love of books started after she was sent to live with her aunt who owned a lot of books. Behold the Dreamers was her first novel which she wrote after observing the dynamics of immigrant life in New York City. It is about a Cameroonian immigrant named Jende Jonga living in New York with his wife and child. They move to the United States chasing the American dream and trying to survive while being undocumented. Jende finds a job as a driver for a senior executive at Lehman Brothers named Clark Edwards. The book follows their journey as all the characters are impacted by the 2008 recessions. Behold the Dreamers was named a Notable Book Of the Year by the New York Times as well as the Washington Post. Imbolo Mbue was the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Award 2017 and the Blue Metropolis Words to Change Award.

Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American author born in Addis Ababa and emigrated to the United States at 2 years old. He has also written pieces for Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Jane Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. All our names is Mengestu’s third book and it is about an Ethiopian man named Isaac and an American social worker named Helen. Even though they are completely individuals, Isaac and Helen fall in love after he moves to the United States and she starts working on his case. All our names spans across continents and time as the characters try to navigate a complicated relationship and Isaac’s complicated past. Mengestu’s work is not just about race or the immigrant experience, this novel in particular is about identity and what defines a person’s life. Dinaw Mengestu has been the recipient of the 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the 2012 MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. His other books include The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air, both equally good books.

Maaza Mengiste is an Ethiopian-American novelist, essayist and a human rights activist. Meginste left Ethiopia at only 3 years old after the coup d’état that hit the Ethiopian government in 1974. After living in Nigeria and Kenya for a while, she settled in the US where she attended New York University and graduated with a creative writing degree. Her second book The Shadow King follows Hirut, a young Ethiopian orphan who becomes a maid to an officer in Emperor Haile Selassy’s army. As the war against the Italians erupts, Hirut and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When the Emperor goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. She helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms. The Shadow King was named best book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, Elle, and Time Magazine. Mengiste was also the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Premio il ponte, and fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Creative Capital.

Wayétu Moore is a writer and social entrepreneur born in Liberia, but fled to America after the 1989 civil war broke out. Moore was only 5 years old when her father, grandmother, 2 sisters and herself left their home in an attempt to reunite with their mother who was already in the United States. Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him. When the three meet in the settlement of Monrovia, their gifts help them salvage the tense relationship between the African American settlers and the indigenous tribes, as a new nation forms around them. She Would Be King was named a Best Book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly & BuzzFeed. Moore is also the founder of One Moore Book, a non-profit organization that creates and distributes culturally relevant books for underrepresented readers.

Chigozie Obioma was born in Akure, Nigeria but emigrated to the United States where he attended the University of Michigan and earned a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing. He has also lived in Cyprus and Turkey. Told by nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The Fishermen is the Cain and Abel-esque story of a childhood in Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his absence to skip school and go fishing. At the forbidden nearby river, they meet a madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings. What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact-both tragic and redemptive-will transcend the lives and imaginations of the book's characters and readers. The Fishermen was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and NPR. Obioma was named one of Foreign Policy's 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2015 and is currently an associate professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer who was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria but moved to the United States at the age of 10. She received her BS from Pennsylvania State University, her MA from Rutgers University, and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Under the Udala Trees is about Ijeoma who comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls. When their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself. But there is a cost to living inside a lie. Under the Udala Trees was named one of NPR's Best Books of 2015 and also made the Buzzfeed, The Wall Street Journal, The Millions, Bustle, Shelf Awareness, and Publishers Lunch "Best of" and "Most Anticipated" lists. Chinelo Okparanta won the Publishing Triangle's 2016 inaugural Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award.

Isidore Okpewho was a Nigerian author and critic who was born in Agbor, Delta State, Nigeria but later attended the University of London and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Classics. Okpewho was the author of five scholarly monographs, four novels, numerous articles and book chapters, and was the editor of over half a dozen anthologies. His book Call Me by My Rightful Name is about a young African American (Otis Hampton) who falls into periodic spasms and chants a text nobody understands. His troubled family seeks help. The text, recorded by a psychiatrist and deciphered by linguists, is found to be a corrupted family chant from the Yoruba of Nigeria. The doctor advises a trip to that ethnic region. The spiritual voices that have been summoning Otis finally bring him, after some alarming experiences in the journey from America through the Nigerian hinterland, to the very spot where his ancestor was enslaved over a century before. The recorded chant helps to locate the man's surviving kin nearby. Okpewho made tremendous contributions to the field of African literature and also won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa in 1993.

Helen Oyeyemi is an author born in Nigeria and emigrated to the United Kingdom at the age of 4. Oyeyemi started writing at the age of 15 and signed her first book contract at the age of 18. She wrote the books White is for Witching, Boy, Snow, Bird, Gingerbread, and Peaces. Her book What is not yours is not yours is a collection of intricately written short stories that documents a variety of characters that span over different periods of time. The reader is invited into a world of lost libraries and locked gardens, of marshlands where the drowned dead live and a city where all the clocks have stopped; students hone their skills at puppet school, the Homely Wench Society commits a guerrilla book-swap, and lovers exchange books and roses on St Jordi's Day. It is a collection of towering imagination, marked by baroque beauty and a deep sensuousness.Oyeyemi brilliantly tells each story while finding a way to connect some of the characters. Oyeyemi has been the recipient of the PEN Open Book Award, and the Somerset Maugham Award. She was also named to the Venus Zine’s “25 under 25” list

Yaa Gyasi is a Ghanaian-born author and novelist who was raised in Huntsville, Alabama from the age of 10. Growing up a shy immigrant child in the south of the United States, Gyasi became attached to books and reading. At 17 years old, she decided to pursue a career in writing after reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Inspired by her trip to Ghana, Homegoing is about two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the Empire. Her sister, Esi, will be imprisoned beneath Effia in the Castle's women's dungeon, and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, where she will be sold into slavery. Stretching from the tribal wars of Ghana to slavery and Civil War in America, from the coal mines in the north to the Great Migration to the streets of 20th century Harlem, Yaa Gyasi's has written a modern masterpiece, a novel that moves through histories and geographies and--with outstanding economy and force--captures the troubled spirit of our own nation. Homegoing was selected for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Award, the PEN/Hemingway award for best first book, and the American Book Award for contributions to diversity in American literature.