Ogaga Reads at the Jazzhole

GLENDORA READINGS

POURING WORDS ON TROUBLED WATERS

THE WRITER AND HIS NATION

Ogaga Ifowodo, a lawyer, holds a Master of Fine Art (MFA) from Cornell University, New York, where he is currently concluding doctoral work.He has published Homeland & Other Poems (1998), winner of the 1993 Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) poetry prize; Madiba (Africa World Press, 2003), winner of the 2003 ANA/Cadbury poetry prize; Homeland (Edition Solitude, 1999), a German-English selection of his poems; and The Oil Lamp (Africa World Press, 2005), winner of the 2005 ANA/NDDC Gabriel Okara poetry prize.



A noted rights activist, he was detained between 1997 and 1998 by the Abacha regime; excerpts from on-going memoirs of his detention experience have been serialised in VANGUARD newspaper (July 2004) and featured in the anthologies Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (Heinemann, 2002) and New Writing 14, released by Granta and the British Council in June 2006.



He is widely published in anthologies and magazines, including Step Into A World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature (John Wiley, 2000); 25 Nigerian Poets (Ishmael Reed Publishing Co., 2000); Dance the Guns to Silence (Flipped Eye, 2005) and The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry International, Mantis, Drumvoices Revue, among others.



He is a fellow of the Iowa Writing Program and was the 1998 recipient of the PEN USA Barbara Goldsmith Freedom-to-Write Award and of the Poets of All Nations (Netherlands) Free Word Award.He is an honorary member of the PEN centers of the USA, Canada, and Germany.



Date: 30th September, 2006
Time: 5pm to 7pm
Venue: The Jazzhole, 168 Awolowo Road, Ikoyi.