A New Era for Nigerian Poetry: Adedayo Agarau’s Debut Collection
Adedayo Agarau, a Nigerian poet, editor, and educator, is set to release his debut poetry collection, The Year of Blood, in Fall 2025. Published by Fordham University Press, the collection promises a groundbreaking entrance into Nigeria’s complex social and political landscapes. Known for his compelling voice in contemporary poetry, Agarau’s work captures the gritty and often uncomfortable realities of his country, addressing themes of ritual killings, absence, cultural memory, and loss. The collection won the 2024 Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize.
An Exploration of Ritual Violence
The Years of Blood is published today, and it reads like a book that has been living in the world already. In advance coverage by Sundress Reads, Livia Meneghin describes the poetry collection as one that guides readers from grief to beauty, highlighting a speaker who is never alone and a landscape rich with hauntings and hope. The notice highlights how the opening prose-block “Wind” stages anxiety and tenderness in the same breath, and how the final “Litany in which my father returns safely at night” closes with a quiet, earned wish.
Much of the collection’s force comes from its attention to vivid detail. Names accrue, streets reappear, objects persist. “Boys who never die” reads like a ledger of the city’s sons, a chorus that refuses flattening. In this register, the book feels less like testimony after the fact and more like a document composed under an experienced climate. Sundress Reads singled out that poem’s three-dimensional portrait of Ìbàdàn’s boys and men, and it functions as a keystone: a community is built not only of wounds but of gazes, small bravados, and ordinary care.
Agarau threads the public record directly into the lyric—“Sọ́kà” quotes a news report about parents forced to identify children from photographs after “years of separation,” then pans across a storeroom of remains and objects: uniforms, leather bags, baby diapers. The matter-of-fact camera — “a lizard swallows an insect and nods”— is unnerving precisely because it withholds rhetoric.
A Critical African Voice
Agarau’s literary journey has already garnered significant recognition. After completing an M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Iowa (Iowa Writers Workshop), he attended the prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University before moving to Los Angeles to resume a Ph.D in Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. Agarau’s work has featured publications such as Narrative, Poetry Foundation, Iowa Review, and World Literature Today. He has also been recognized as a finalist for several major awards, including the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and the Montreal Prize.
His debut collection, The Year of Blood, follows a series of successful chapbooks, including The Origin of Name, which was selected for the New-Generation African Poets series, and The Arrival of Rain.
Contributions to Literary Communities
Beyond his work on the page, Agarau is an advocate for the development of literary communities, particularly across Africa. As a Cave Canem Fellow and a founding editor of Poetry Sango-Ota, a platform dedicated to mentoring and supporting emerging Nigerian poets, he is actively working to nurture new voices and create opportunities for aspiring writers. His involvement in programs like the UnSerious Collective Fellowship, which supports emerging Nigerian writers, showcases his commitment to elevating voices that might otherwise go unheard. Adedayo has announced the Alhaji Arole Agarawu African Poetry Prize, which seeks to award a poem written by an African person.
Agarau’s work extends to his editorial roles, including serving as the Poetry Book Reviews Editor at The Rumpus and as the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowo Magazine, an influential African literary platform. His editorial work has allowed him to shape and amplify the voices of numerous writers, reinforcing his position as a key figure in the global literary ecosystem.
About Adedayo Agarau
Adedayo Agarau is a Nigerian poet, editor, and educator. He holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Iowa and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Agarau has written five chapbooks, with The Year of Blood set for release in Fall 2025. He is actively involved in supporting emerging Nigerian poets and has contributed to major literary publications, including Poetry Foundation, Iowa Review, and World Literature Today. Agarau’s work addresses themes of migration, cultural memory, and postcolonial identity, with a particular focus on ritual violence in Nigeria.
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