Welcome Benchers!
We are turbo-charged by your support for this reading community and book club! Thank you for being a member of Brown Bamboo. Invite your friends and poetry avatars!
What is Brown Bamboo?
Brown Bamboo is pleased to introduce itself as a small poetry book club. The club dedicates its attention to the rejuvenation of poetry spirit, celebration of language, and aesthetic innovation. Committed readership can highlight the power of imagination in addressing the most pertinent issues in Africa and the new Black Diaspora.
Brown Bamboo derives its name from a gathering place for the elders called Bómpé. Bómpé is made of brown bamboo originally neatly arranged up to ten feet. Bamboo sticks are lined horizontally beside each other with little space in-between to form a big bench. For that reason, we call our club members, benchers. Bómpé is an assembly, a space of poetry as much as politics where power structures are heavily contested and debated.
In the last one and half decades, African poetry has taken a new leap. A new generation of African poets has emerged in the African market and the new Black diaspora. The intervention of publishing markets such as the African Poetry Book Fund cannot be underestimated. Yet, these griots have little place of gathering in African space.
Readership of African literature today has overemphasized a prose genre above other literary genres as the cumulative sum of African literature. Brown Bamboo is an attempt to retrieve the place of African poetry in African literature. We are gathering readers of African poetry.
Given the changing literary climate in continental Africa and the new Black Diaspora in general, we are committed on our part to the constituency of poetry not only to highlight the new talents in African poetry firmament, but also to engage griots whose reign of language has illuminated our shared world. Our task is therefore simple: to bring readership of poetry to your doorstep.
What will Brown Bamboo do next?
We are getting into the launching phase of the club. As expected, it will be a poetry feast. We are still sorting the cards out with our guest(s) poet. Soon, you will receive our newsletter about the poet(s) that will launch our bench. This letter will include a couple of poems from the book that will be read, unfortunately not all! We give you this appetizer because as the Yoruba saying goes, money is the ingredients of the sumptuous soup (soup wey sweet, na money kill am)! If you enjoy the poets, a gesture is appreciated from the audience to buy their books as a return. We are a non-profit, connected by the faith in poetry!
Oh well, when we send you our nudge we will also include the book description, as well as blurbs and endorsements that the poets have received on their work.
Where will Brown Bamboo host its reading?
We are reading at the top of the galaxy aka the Internet. Because Brown Bamboo is run by a group of committed friends and poetry loyalists, who are several miles away from one another, we keep our meetings on the seventh heaven. We will have a great Zoom Happy Hour! When Brown Bamboo sends you a newsletter about proposed reading event, it will include the credentials passcode and an eventbrite link. We don’t want our event hijacked by cyber runts, so it is all good if you are a member so you can receive our eventbrite link, and other poetry goodies!
Brown Bamboo Partners
Adedayo Agarau is a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowships finalist, Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Cave Canem Fellow. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine: A Journal of African Literature and Art and a Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. He is the author of the chapbooks, Origin of Names (African Poetry Book Fund, 2020) and The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020). Adedayo’s debut collection, "The Years of Blood," won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers and will be published by Fordham University Press in the fall of 2025. He is a lead conversationalist at Brown Bamboo.
Iyanuoluwa Adenle is a poet and essayist living in Lagos. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Review, Chestnut Review, Agbowo, Banshee Lit, Tender Photo, Maroko, Peppercoast Lit, Olongo, Lolwe, and elsewhere. She is currently a poetry reader at ANMLY. She is a lead conversationalist at Brown Bamboo.
Hussain Ahmed is the author of Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile, a 2023 poetry award honoree by the Society of Midland Authors, and a finalist of the Luchei Prize for African Poetry. Ahmed’s second collection Blue Exodus won the 2022 Orison poetry prize. Ahmed’s poems have been featured in Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Electric Lit, A Public Space and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from University of Mississippi where he was awarded The Bondurant Prize and the Barry and Susan Hannah Award. He is completing a doctoral degree from the University of Cincinnati. He is a lead conversationalist at Brown Bamboo.
Jide Salawu is a literary scholar and Nigerian poet. He is the current managing editor of OlongoAfrica. Salawu’s work has appeared in Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Transition, Grain, This Magazine, Lolwe, and Poetry Society of America, LitHub, Popula, The Mantle, The Republic, Preachy, CBC, and Public Parking. His research work has appeared in Journal of African Cultural Studies, African Identities, and forthcoming in Journal of African Literature Association. He is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland published under African Poetry Book Fund, and Contraband Bodies forthcoming in Fall 2025 under NeWest Press. Salawu has won poetry fellowships and awards to his credit. He is the founding conversationalist at Brown Bamboo.
Rasaq Malik Gbolahan is a graduate of the University of Ibadan. He is a co-founder of Àtẹ́lẹwọ́, a journal devoted to publishing literary work written in the Yorùbá language. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks, No Home In This Land and The Other Names Of Grief. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in African American Review, Antigonish Review, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Lit Hub, Michigan Quarterly Review, Minnesota Review, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, Salt Hill, Spillway, Southern Humanities Review, Stand, Transition, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. He won Honorable Mention in 2015 Best of the Net for his poem “Elegy”, published in One. In 2017, Rattle and Poet Lore nominated his poems for the Pushcart Prize. He was shortlisted for Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2017. He was a finalist for Sillerman First Book for African Poets in 2018. He is a lead conversationalist at Brown Bamboo.
Brown Bamboo Advisers