Join Cave Canem in celebrating the winner of the 2024 Cave Canem Prize, Ajibola Tolase, with a reading of his prize-winning collection, 2000 Blacks.
2000 Blacks is a collection that probes the complexity of economic and politically motivated migration from Africa which has been reported in the BBC as “African Brain Drain.” With readings from Tolase and Lynne Thompson, the 2024 Cave Canem Prize Judge, the evening will explore poetry as a tool to answer questions regarding sociological phenomena, migration, and the meaning of home.
This program is presented in partnership with the New School’s Creative Writing Program.
"Utilizing a variety of forms from abecedarian to sonnet, crisscrossing the globe from the island of Lampedusa to Atlanta’s Centennial Park bombings, Ajibola Tolase’s poems are evocative, a calling forth of the voices and experiences of the disenfranchised, the lost, the lonely. The poems are sure-footed in their wailing. I was all in from the first poem when I was told 'it does not vex me that dead men [walk] through my poems.' Read this collection to learn the why of it and what it means." – Lynne Thompson
Ajibola Tolase is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He graduated from the creative writing MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His chapbook, Koola Lobitos, was published as a part of the New Generation African Poets Series edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani in 2021. His writing has appeared in LitHub, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, and elsewhere. He received the Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford University, the Olive B. O'Connor fellowship at Colgate University, and a creative writing grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation.
Lynne Thompson was the 2021-2022 Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, her poetry collections include Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press), winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press); and Fretwork (Marsh Hawk Press). Thompson’s honors include the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award and the Stephen Dunn Prize as well as fellowships from the City of Los Angeles, Vermont Studio Center, and the Summer Literary Series in Kenya. A lawyer by training, Thompson sits on the boards of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Cave Canem and is the Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College, her alma mater. She facilitates private workshops, most recently for Beyond Baroque, Poetry By the Sea Conference, Moorpark College Writers Festival, and Central Coast Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Poem-A-Day (Academy of American Poets), New England Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Ecotone, and The Best American Poetry, to name a few. Thompson is a native of Los Angeles, California, where she resides.