"When the writer Kwame Dawes began searching for a press that published African poetry, he noticed a disconcerting void. "It became clear to me that there was not one single press in the world that was devoted to publishing African poets," he explains. "That just seemed unbelievable." The few poetry publishers across the continent tended toward small-scale, regional distribution, meaning that even when African poets did release books, their range of influence rarely extended beyond the boundaries of their own home countries.
Dawes began to see that the flow of literature into Africa was also constrained. As he read the submissions of African poets for a literary contest, he noted that while the poets wrote with urgency and passion, the poetics of certain authors seemed surprisingly dated. Gauging by their work, the contestants hadn't read poetry more recent than the Modernists."
https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/mitigating-the-silence/- Ikhide
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