Generations

Abstract

Launched in 2014 under the aegis of the African Poetry Book Fund, the New-Generation African Poets chapbook box set series, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, has become an annual event in African poetry. In its first ten sets, the series has published nearly one hundred chapbooks by early-career poets. Rather than treating these poets as a single generation, this chapter reads the editorial framing, prefaces, and poems of the chapbook series for the salience of generational thinking. Many of the “new-generation” poets make family their thematic material, presenting the inheritance of knowledge, narrative, and even language itself as troubled. They actively undertake a literary construction of lineage involving both families of birth and the chosen family of other poets. Reinventing family out of the materials of their intimate worlds in an ongoing pursuit of freedom from patriarchy, heteronormativity, and coloniality, these poets invite us into new imaginative worlds.