When we announced the LIPFest Craft and Development Lab earlier this year, our hope was to create a space where writers could develop their work through sustained conversation, mentorship, and community. The responses to our open call exceeded every expectation.
Over three hundred poets and writers from across Africa and the diaspora applied to join the programme. The applications reflected an extraordinary range of voices, forms, and artistic concerns. We encountered manuscripts rooted in memory and migration, documentary poetry, spoken word projects, performance works, myth, history, ecology, faith, family, and political life. Selecting just ten participants was no easy task.
The writers who make up this inaugural cohort are talented and deeply committed to building lasting bodies of work. Many are already published, prize-winning, or active within literary communities. Others are at earlier stages of their careers but demonstrated exceptional promise and clarity of purpose. What they all share is a willingness to challenge themselves, engage seriously with critique, and invest in their artistic growth.
Over the next four months they will work with internationally recognised poets Romeo Oriogun, Nick Makoha, Titilope Sonuga, and others, through workshops, mentorship, peer critique, and professional development sessions designed to support both their creative practice and long-term careers.
THE INAUGURAL COHORT
Ayinde Jean-Baptiste (Haiti/USA)
Ayinde Jean-Baptiste is co-creator & librettist of the multi platform dance work Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans+ other Urban Legends, co-producer of the audio essay suite Carceral Fictions & Abolitionist Realities, & disciple of Kamau Brathwaite, Ayinde Jean-Baptiste is a sanba/ black myth scientist who shifts culture through memory. mother born colonized father free, Sko was forged in empire a sword dreaming psalm. quenched in DuSable City’s sweet waters, Sko travels with time, gods believe in hymn. uncultivated by institutional artistic networks prior to the mass death of 2020, Sko has since studied alongside Staceyann Chin, K’eguro Macharia, Willie Perdomo, Jaquira Diaz, Kenzie Allen, Nicole Shawan Junior, Deidra White, Maria Judice, Ajanaé Dawkins, Dra. Raina J León & Dante Micheaux. Sko has also contributed to praxis communities at VONA, CCCADI, CSRGC Global Blackness Summer School, Wild Seeds Writers Retreat, The New Art School Modality, Roots.Wounds.Words, Fellowship of the Griots & the Stonecoast MFA. @Ayinsko wherever you seek.
Edinam Denoo (Ghana)
Denoo Edinam Yawo is a Ghanaian poet and writer whose work delves into themes of the body, the politics of language, spirituality, and faith at the intersection of living. She is a 2025 Black Atlantic Residency Fellow, an alumna of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies(JIAS) Creative Writing Workshop for Emerging writers, as well the 2025 CAINE Online Editing Workshop. She is the 2024 Second Runner-Up and the 2025 First Runner-Up of the Adinkra Poetry Prize. She is also a recipient of the 2025 DUAPA Mentorship Program. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Guernica, Rowayat, The Kalahari Review, Tampered Press, New Coin and others.
Felix Eshiet (Nigeria)
Denoo Edinam Yawo is a Ghanaian poet and writer whose work delves into themes of the body, the politics of language, spirituality, and faith at the intersection of living. She is a 2025 Black Atlantic Residency Fellow, an alumna of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies(JIAS) Creative Writing Workshop for Emerging writers, as well the 2025 CAINE Online Editing Workshop. She is the 2024 Second Runner-Up and the 2025 First Runner-Up of the Adinkra Poetry Prize. She is also a recipient of the 2025 DUAPA Mentorship Program. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Guernica, Rowayat, The Kalahari Review, Tampered Press, New Coin and others.
Joemario Umana
(Nigeria)
Joemario Umana, Swan XVII, is a Nigerian creative writer and performance poet who considers himself a wildflower. A Fellow of the SprinNG Writing Fellowship (2023), he is winner of the Gbemisola Adeoti Prize for Poetry (2026), co-winner of the Folorunsho Editor Poetry Prize (2025), and second-place winner of the Rhonda Gail Williford Poetry Prize (2025), among other honors including third place in the October Project Prize for Poetry (2026). His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Journal, Chestnut Review, Orange Blossom Review, Frontier Poetry, Uncanny Magazine, LOLWE, Strange Horizons, South Florida Poetry Journal, Ubwali Lit, ONE ART Journal, Akpata Magazine, Poetry Sango-Ota, Poetry Column–NND, trampset, and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the Brooklyn Poets Fellowship (2026) and shortlisted for the Evaristo Prize for Poetry, the Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, the Kayode Aderinokun Poetry Prize, and the Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature. He serves as Poetry Editor at Akpata Magazine and Ekondo Review. When life gives him breathing space, he watches movies and anime, and roams the streets of Twitter as @JoemarioU38615.
Karen Lee (Jamaica/Canada)
karen lee (she/shi/fi ar) is a Jamaican-Canadian actor/voiceover artist/vocalist and writer living in Tsi Tkaròn:to, Ontarí:io, Kanata. Her writing centres reclamation of voice against Black girl/woman voicelessness in the aftermath of racist/colonial violence and trauma, and celebrates survival. Her activist poetry intervenes apocalyptic settler-colonialism and state violence in the face of racialized erasure.
lee is the winner of a 2023 Cave Canem fellowship, Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award (Poetry), and 2020 Pacific Spirit Poetry Grand Prize, PRISM international. Find her polyvocal refusals in: Unstitching Silence: fiction and poetry by Caribbean writers on gender-based violence, Obsidian, Room, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, shortlisted for the 2018 Small Axe Literary Prize, and others. Tekkin Back Tongue, her first manuscript, is named after her self-directed writing residency in Ghana, Kenya (2018), followed by Kenya (2021), Germany, France (2022), Senegal (2024), Jamaica (2024), Jamaica, Barbados (2025). A publisher is reviewing Tekkin Back Tongue.
https://www.karenleeartist.com/
https://linktr.ee/karenleeartist
Lillian Akampurira Aujo (Uganda)
Lillian Akampurira Aujo is a writer from Uganda. She emerged a commended poet for the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2025 and the James Berry Poetry Prize 2024. She is the recipient of the Jalada Prize for Literature. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Gerald Kraak Award and the 2018 Brittle Paper Anniversary Award, and longlisted for the 2018 Nommo Award. Her writing has been published by Adda Commonwealth, HarperVia, New Internationalist, Prairie Schooner, Transition Magazine, Jalada Africa, Jacana Literary Foundation, and Omenana Magazine. Her poetry has been translated into Malayalam and Italian. She is a graduate of the MA Creative Writing (Poetry) program at the University of East Anglia, where she was a Global Voices Scholar. She freelances as a writing mentor, facilitator, and editor.
Lydia Nyachiro Kasese (Tanzania)
Phodiso Modirwa (Botswana)
Roseline Mgbodichinma (Nigeria)
Roseline Mgbodichinma is the author of A Body In Spice, selected for the African Poetry Book Fund’s New-Generation African Poets chapbook series. Her writing explores the intricate relationships between nature, womanhood, emotion, bodies and desire. She is a Lawyer and an alumna of the Library of Africa and The African Diaspora (LOATAD) West African Writers Residency Programme. Her work has appeared in Isele Magazine, Brittle Paper, A Long House, Duke University Press, North Dakota Literary, Tampered Press, JFA Human Rights Journal, Xylom, The Willowherb Review, Agbowo and SprinNG, among others. She blogs at www.mgbodichi.com
Salmah Suleiman Usman (Nigeria)
Oloruntobiloba Abiodun (Nigeria)
Tobi Abiodun is a Benin City-born storyteller and poet whose work explores conscious, deeply personal narratives through poetry, performance, music, and film. Widely recognized for popularizing the use of Nigerian Pidgin in contemporary spoken word, he blends a gentle command of language with a raw, compelling delivery.
His short story, Eyes Like the Burning End of a Cigarette, was longlisted for the PIN Prize for Fiction, while his poetry has appeared in NantyGreens, Animal Press, Feral, Nymphs and Thugs, Komorebi Magazine, Malimbe Magazine, and other publications. He has performed at the Poetry Africa Festival, Lagos International Poetry Festival, BBC Radio, and the U.S. Consulate, and has created commissioned work for Guinness Nigeria, Oando PLC, Hewlett-Packard, and the MacArthur Foundation.
Abiodun is the founder of Before the Silence, a global virtual poetry workshop, and currently works in advertising, using storytelling to shape culture and influence the mass market.
Collectively, they are developing poetry collections, chapbooks, spoken word albums, documentary poetry, performance pieces, and interdisciplinary projects that speak to the breadth and vitality of contemporary African writing.
We look forward to following their journeys over the coming months and sharing their work with our community.
To every writer who applied, thank you. The care, imagination, and ambition evident in your submissions reaffirmed why this programme exists. We hope this is only the beginning of many future cohorts.