African Urban Echoes

Salawu Jide is a writer and a PhD student at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. He is the editor of Olongo Africa, a member of The Brick House. Rasaq Malik is a Nigerian poet and essayist. With r d?lá Ibrahim, Malik is the co-founder of Àt l?w, the first digital journal devoted to publishing works written in the Yorùbá language. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó.

For more than two decades, poetry anthologies in African literature have navigated the shared world of African identity or living in the continent of Africa without capturing comprehensively the lifeworld of African cities. African Urban Echoes is a gathering of poets, including notable Canadian poets such as Jumoke Verissimo, Uchechukwu Umezurike, James Yeku and the Griffin Poetry Prize winner, Tolu Oloruntoba, that seek to contribute to the echoes of resistance, hope, and anxieties all produced simultaneously by African urban centers in their polyvalences and unique characters. Poets from different African countries evoke detailed portraits of lives as cities and cities as lives. They compel us to see both the defined and undefined beauties of African cities through sublime experiences captured in disparate forms and network of images in this anthology. They immerse their readers in marginal realities of urban citizenship and turn them to witnesses of both familiar and unfamiliar landscapes from Lagos, Lome, Johannesburg to Tunis, and of places that are inevitably part of their stories as pilgrims, as travelers settling and leaving.