About

Chisom Okafor, Nigerian poet and clinical nutritionist, is the author of Winged Witnesses (University of Nebraska Press, 2025) and the chapbook, All I know About A Heavy Heart Is How To Carry It (Jacar Press, 2025), selected by Jaki Shelton Green as winner of the New Voices Award. He has received nominations for the CAAPP Book Prize, twice for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Brunel African Poetry Prize, twice for the Gerald Kraak Prize, and twice for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His poems also appear in Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Jacar One, North Dakota Quarterly, Rattle, A Long House, and elsewhere. He has also received support from the Sundress Academy for the Arts (for the Sundress residency) and the Commonwealth Foundation. Alongside Daniel Sluman and Karthika Nair, he served on the advisory panel for Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent Poets (ed. Rachael Boast), and was co-editor for the 20:35 Africa Anthology series. He is presently studying for his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama, where he is a Graduate Council Fellow.

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