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Nebraska U hosts African Poetry Digital Portal’s first in-person conference
The African Poetry Digital Portal at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln will be holding a panel discussion and reading at 5:30 p.m. April 28 at the Sheldon Museum of Art during its Spring Conference from April 27-29.
The panel and reading is free and open to the public. This conversation on contemporary African poetry will feature writers and scholars: Patricia Jabbeh Wesley (Liberia), Tsitsi Jaji (Zimbabwe), and Mahtem Shiferraw (Ethiopia/Eritrea). These acclaimed writers will explore the centrality of gender as well as the intersections of the global and national in their own work, and in African literature today.
The Spring Conference is organized and hosted by Nebraska’s Kwame Dawes, George Holmes Distinguished Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, and Lorna Dawes, associate professor of University Libraries. It is an opportunity for scholars, archivists, librarians, digital humanities specialists and poets from around the world to engage in and expand the work of the African Poetry Digital Portal. While the group has been meeting and accomplishing its work remotely, this conference is the first time the partners will get together in-person.
“The collaborators attending the Spring Conference will be discussing the collections and archives they’ve identified as well as the development of the database we are creating,” said Rezina Habtemariam, project manager.
The African Poetry Digital Portal is welcoming members from collaborating institutions as well as colleagues from the university’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and the Libraries. The spring conference provides an opportunity to share the collections work and research gathered in the last two years, as well as develop the plan for the next iteration of the African Poetry Digital Portal.
The African Poetry Digital Portal is an ongoing initiative dedicated to providing global access to digital collections, projects, and scholarship on African poetry. Launched in 2017, the preliminary research and design for the portal was supported by the Ford Foundation. This included the development of two foundational features, the Index of Contemporary African Poets and African Poets in the News.
The current phase of the project, supported by $750,000 awarded to Kwame and Lorna Dawes by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, involves expanding the research and scholarship on African poetry. This includes collaborating with institutions to create a digital collections hub that will give access to materials held by institutions worldwide.
The African Poetry Digital Portal is collaborating with the University of Cape Town in South Africa, University of Lomé in Togo, University of Ghana, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Northwestern University, University of Michigan and the Library of Congress.
Learn more about African Poetry Digital Portal here.
