Gbenga Adesina, a Nigerian poet and essayist, is the inaugural Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Black Global and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. He received his master’s of fine arts from New York University, where he was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. He is the co-founder and editor of A Long House, a journal of diasporic art, thought, and literature. He has won multiple fellowships, and his poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Guernica, Narrative Magazine, The Yale Review, The Best American Poetry, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.

(Photo credit: Ladan Osman)