We are excited to announce the juries for the first edition of the Libretto African Anthology Prize (LAAP) which opened for submissions on 1st November, 2021.
The Juring Panel includes Tendai Rinos Mwanaka, D.M. Aderibigbe, Ubaji Isaka Abubakar Eazy and Dhee Sylvester.
The juries will select the longlist, shortlist and the winner for the anthology. The longlist will be announced in March.
Tendai Rinos Mwanaka is a Zimbabwean publisher, editor, mentor, thinker, literary artist, visual artist and musical artist with 21 individual books and 23 curated and edited anthologies published. He writes in English and Shona. His artwork has been nominated, shortlisted and won several prizes, and have also appeared in over 400 journals and anthologies from over 30 countries. He has translated 2 books into Shona and his poetry collection Logbook Written by a Drifter has been translated and published into Serbian, Albanian, Arabic and Spanish and his poetry pieces have also been translated and published into Shona, Serbian, Spanish, Arabic, Bengali, Tamil, Macedonian, Albanian, Hungarian, Russian, Romanian, French and German. His artwork has been exhibited in Sweden Arna Gallery, South Africa Alice Gallery and Canada by Vancouver Book Art Exhibition. He is currently working on two musical works, one album is composed of Mbira, Keyboards and lyricsand another album is composed of Marimba, Keyboards and Poetry which he hopes to release soon
D.M. Aderibigbe, a native of Nigeria, is the author of a book of poems, How the End First Showed (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), which won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, among other honors. He’s currently an assistant professor in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Dhee Sylvester is a Writer and Visual Artist from Lagos, Nigeria. He’s the author of From Man To God, the co-author of Two Shades of Crazy, and he has been featured in numerous literary projects and anthologies both in print and online. He’s the Deputy Editor of Libretto Magazine and a Publication Editor at Lunaris Review. He was nominated for the 2017 Best of the Net award and he’s a recipient of the Black Pride prize for Oratory.
Ubaji Isiaka Abubakar Eazy is a poet, short story writer, editor, and essayist. He has written myriad critical essays on literature and has most of them published on www.memorila.com. His poems have also found their way onto various literary platforms. His hobby is discussing the literary arts.