ABOUT

Brian Gyamfi is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Zell Fellowship at the University of Michigan, two Hopwood Awards, the Helen S. and John Wagner Prize, and the Michael R. Gutterman Award. He has been a finalist for the Poetry International Prize, the Oxford Poetry Prize, the Hopwood Drama Award, and the National Poetry Series.

His work explores a foundation of Blackness in the essence of being, hauntology, and deviance. He writes about boyhood, love, ancestral memory, and spirituality, offering a potential path to liberation, Blackness, and the imagination.

Underpinning Gyamfi’s writing are the contributions of Black and Postcolonial scholarship: his work is a dialogue with the ancestors and with the living.

Gyamfi graduated summa cum laude with honors from the University of Texas, earning his BA, and later received his MFA from the University of Michigan, where he taught academic composition and creative writing.

His libretto The Ants Are Illuminated was commissioned by Overtone Industry for their Original Vision opera. His work has appeared in POETRY, Narrative Magazine, The Adroit Journal, Poetry International, Guernica, and other publications. He serves as a contributing editor at Oxford Poetry.