Raz-Shumaker in Poetry Goes to Gbenga Adesina

Congratulations to Gbenga Adesina, the winner of the 2024 Raz-Schumaker Book Prize in Poetry! His winning manuscript is entitled Death Does Not End at the Sea.

“The year I began my immigration journey was also the year my father passed away, and I was at a junction of speechlessness in which all my thoughts and sighs were elegies, but an elegy without language,” Adesina said. “It was Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal, among other books, that began to teach me how to assemble the fragments of grief and from them build a new voice, how to situate my own private loss within history.” 

Joseph Millar, a Pushcart Prize-winning poet, also praised Adesina’s unforgettable imagery: “Throughout the collection, the images are dazzling, trailing bright threads of unconscious energy. This poetic voice is both ancient and fresh.” 

Hilda Raz, one of this year’s judges and the founder of the Raz-Shumaker Book Prize, also praised Adesina: “This poet writes extraordinary poems in a book of private and communal grief.”

For more from Adesina, check out his poem “Glory”, which was published in 2020 as part of Poem-a-Day. Adesina has also been awarded the Creative Writing Grant Award from Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room. Additionally, he is the co-founder of A Long House, a journal and digital frontier for critical discourse about new Afro-diasporic literature.