Press Release: The New Anthology of Young African and African American Poetry
OlongoAfrica Press is pleased to announce the publication of The New Anthology of Young African and African American Poetry, a collection that galvanizes emerging poets from Africa and the African American community/diaspora in a shared literary space.
Since its inception, OlongoAfrica has recorded different literary successes and publications of new books as part of its vision in promoting African literatures and cultures. This includes a new edition of An African Abroad, the terrific travelogue of Olabisi Ajala, OlongoAfrica Multilingual Anthologies Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. In 2026, we began another literary initiative of chapbook series for young African writers. The New Anthology of Young African and African American Poetry is our inaugural chapbook for the series to come.
Edited by Prosper Ifeanyi and Abdulkareem Abdulkareem, this anthology centers the diverse and multifaceted experiences, histories, identities, language, and imaginative world of young Black poets in the contemporary world. Featuring writers from the African continent and its diaspora alongside African American poets, the collection explores the connections and tensions that shape Black identity across geographical and cultural boundaries. In lieu of highlighting Africa and African America as separate literary traditions, the anthology presents an overlapping sphere of histories of migration, memory, race, displacement, belonging, resistance, and cultural inheritance .
The project crystallizes as a desire to amplify young voices and challenge the limited ways African and African American literary traditions are often positioned in relation to one another. Through its range of poetic styles and perspectives, the anthology demonstrates the vitality and complexity of contemporary Black poetics.
OlongoAfrica Press presents The New Anthology of Young African and African American Poetry as a new circuit in new-generation poetic experience.