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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Books, Poetry
Available on November 1, 2025
All I Know About a Heavy Heart is How to Carry It. (Forthcoming, 2025)
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& Free ShippingAll I Know About a Heavy Heart Is How to Carry It is a celebrated revival of the absorbing language of an observant writer who raises and struggles with the right questions that the heart requires answering. Chisom Okafor, recipient of the Jacar Press New Voices Award, does not spoon-feed simplicity but poetically restores chaos and complexity as a universal way of seeing and writing that demands so much more but offers even more in return. This collection of poetry interrogates what it means to be human and vulnerable through raw fierce and unflinching energy that sweeps the reader through unexpected passages and dislocations.
— Jaki Shelton Green.
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