Writer-in-RESIDENCy
June 12 – 26, 2025
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin
O-Jeremiah Agbaakin is the author of The Sign of the Ram (APBF/Akashic Books, 2023), selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation African Poets Chapbook series. His poems and reviews are published in Kenyon Review, POETRY Magazine, TRANSITION, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A member of the Unserious Collective, he’s the recipient of scholarship, fellowship, and residency from Good Hart Artist Residency, Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), Bread Loaf, Key West Literary Seminar, and Tin House; and was a finalist for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets.
He currently serves as the associate editor of Iron Horse Literary Review and is a doctoral student of Creative Writing and Literature at University of Georgia where he’s won the Graduate Research Award from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, among other honors.
Artist Statement:
My poetry examines a familiar question: what’s the cost of human progress? For about a decade now, I’ve been fascinated with Babel as a mythological subject and construct in our contemporary imagination of civilization. If the garden of Eden is the origin story of the natural world, then the tower of Babel is an origin story of an industrialized, postlapsarian one. My poetry asks how we can reconcile the two. The result of that question is a manuscript project, titled Aporia, which weaves familial history across a universal one. The project continues to evolve new themes such as the ecological crises, alienation arising from the language formation at the site of Babel, labor and labor exploitation that goes into building and maintaining all empires. The South African writer Nadine Gordimer wrote that “if you’re a writer, you can make the death of a canary stand for the whole mystery of death.” This wisdom has pushed me to find my own canary.
This canary is the little garden in our old family house that I can only reconstruct from memory just like how the canary builds its nest from scraps. The canary is the memory of learning the names of trees in our house– before learning about them inside books– whenever my sawmiller parents talked about trees to cut down for industrial processing in the rainforest of Southwestern Nigeria. My canary is the story of familial transformation in the face of deforestation and ecological change. For me, Babel is no longer a mythological place when one granularly considers the disruption at the family unit when God decided to punish the builders’ hubris with a language. My goal is to revise “Aporia” and expand the second poetry manuscript, a very ecologically-driven work that adopts the Fibonacci series form. It is a long-poem book that moves away from all these canaries and focuses on one. It is inspired by Inger Christensen’s book, “Alphabet” that celebrates the productive value of extinction anxiety as a rallying cry for conservation and care for the natural world; and Harryette Mullen’s Urban Tumbleweed.
Community Engagement
