Gbenga Adeoba

Gbenga Adeoba was a finalist for the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and poems published in Oxford Poetry, Pleiades, Salamander, Notre Dame Review, Hotel Amerika, Poet Lore, Among several others. He is currently an MFA student at the Iowa Creative Writing Workshop. Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry, ‘Gbenga Adeoba’s collection Exodus focuses on forms of migration due to the slave trade, war, natural disasters, and economic opportunities.

Using the sea as a source of language and metaphor, Adeoba explores themes of memory, transition, and the intersections between the historic and the imagined. With great tenderness and power his poetry of empathy searches for meaning in sharply constructed images, creating scenes of making and unmaking while he investigates experiences of exile and displacement across time and place.