Gbenga Adesina

About Gbenga

Gbenga Adesina, Nigerian poet and essayist, is the winner of the 2020 Narrative Prize. His writing occupies the intersections of human migrations, lineage, and memory, and has has been published by the Harvard Review, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, American Academy of Poet's Poem-A-Day, Yale Review, the Poetry Review UK, and The New York Times, where the editor praised his poetry for its "clarity of observation and empathetic insight into the suffering of another."

Before Interlochen, Adesina was the Olive B.O'Connor Poetry Fellow at Colgate University, where he taught a popular poetry class called, "Song of the Human." He has been invited to lecture, read, and perform his work at the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, DC, and elsewhere. He's the co-founding editor of A Long House, a journal of global conversations, literature, and art across diasporas.

I love to tell my students poetry is the voice of our most intimate self. I encourage them to practise creative listening and anticipate wonder and surprise.