Fiday Poetry: BHION ACHIMBA, NIGERIAN POET, ANNOUNCED AS A FELLOW OF THE 2023 RUTH LILY AND DOROTHY SARGENT ROSENBERG POETRY FELLOWSHIP
By Saheed Sunday
Bhion Achimba, a Nigerian poet and founding-editor of Dgeku magazine who was earlier shortlisted as a finalist among twelve others for the 2023 Rosenberg Poetry fellowship, has now been announced by Poetry Foundation as one of the final five fellows for the 2023 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. The other four, who are respectively from different cultures, are Roda Avelar, Ariana Benson, Chrysanthemum, and Willie Lee Kinard. The fellowship is sponsored by the Poetry Foundation which honours five outstanding young poets annually with an invitation to publish in the magazine itself. As Poetry Foundation puts it, the five fellows for the Rosenberg Poetry fellowship will work alongside one another, and receive a grant of $27,000 to work on poetry in any tradition of their choice.
Bhion Achimba is a poet who grew up in Southeastern Nigeria. He was the 2019 Harvard University Scholar at Risk, a Visiting Poet in its English Department, and the 2020 Summer Visiting Artist at the Oregon Institute for Creative Research. He also has successfully received his Masters of Fine Arts degree from Brown University. He has his works published in magazines and journals including The New York Times, Guernica Magazine, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, Paris Review, Poet Lore among others. In 2021, he was named the 1st Place Winner of the 2021 Award for New Poets by Frontier Poetry for his poem titled “a sonnet: a slaughter field”, as selected by Rosebud Ben-One, Andrés Cerpa, and Mai Der Vang who were the judges.
Bhion’s poetry is mostly centered around identity. It is mostly centered around the revivalism of a lost identity, or sexuality. His poem, “Partial Recollection” published by The Paris Review, is a reflection on the state of a lost culture which is represented as a “village” or a “house”. The line “a ghost is hanging from the doorpost of our past” foregrounds the need for revivalism of whatever culture the past represents. He revolves around something very similar in his poem “Burial: Language” published by Poet Lore. In this particular poem, he heavily represents the motif of identity through the word language. The line “the mist she must pass to get to the house and to her father” reflects how Bhion opines through his poetry that the African identity is almost lost —if not totally lost— and that the road back to it is full of fog.
Saheed Sunday, NGP V, is a Nigerian poet, a Star Prize awardee, a Best of the Net nominee, and a HCAF member. He is the author of a poetry collection: Rewrite The Stars. He won the ZODML Poetry Prize; he was shortlisted for the Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award, Wingless Dreamer Poetry Prize and The Breakbread Literacy Project.
