Konya Shamsrumi Announces Tafirenyika, Anena, Grieder, Gatawa and Sabouke as Columnists

Clockwise from top left: Tinashe Tafirenyika, Harriet Anena, Maryam Gatawa, SAi Sabouke and Andrea Grieder

We at Konya Shamsrumi are excited to announce that five new columnist-bloggers are joining us from four different countries.

Our new columnist-bloggers are Tinashe Tafirenyika from Zimbabwe, who is the youngest person to win the National Arts Merit Award in 2017. She did a double bill and won again in 2018. Harriet Anena from Uganda is also a noted poet whose stunning debut collection, A Nation in Labour, won the 2018 Wole Soyinka Poetry Prize. Andrea Grieder is a Swiss national who runs Rwanda’s Transpoesis. Andrea holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Zurich and has worked in trauma and the transformative and healing qualities of poetry in post conflict. Maryam Gatawa is a stunning poet and arts promoter based in Kano, Nigeria. She is working on a chapbook and her debut collection of poems. SAi Sabouke is a fiery new poet from Nigeria whose provocative poems and posts have gained him great visibility in Nigeria and beyond.

Our press has garnered attention with its recent release of our two collections— Umar Sidi’s The Poet of Dust and Richard Ali’s The Anguish and Vigilance of Things. We are also working on releasing two chapbooks, by Funmi Gaji and Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, this year.

On behalf of Sidi, Richard and Funmi, I welcome you all to the Konya Shamsrumi family.

Rasaq Malik Gbolahan,
for
#KSRCollective