Vitabu Books

The Truth About the Fact | An International Journal of Literary Nonfiction International Call for Submissions The Truth About the Fact are now accepting submissions of nonfiction essays and memoirs, nonfiction poetry, and visual artwork for their fourth issue. The deadline is December 31st, 2010. Submissions are to be made by email only: editor@thetruthaboutthefact.com Guidelines for all submissions: All work must be nonfiction. Please do not send fictional prose or poetry. Essays, memoir, and commentary must be between 1,000-5,000 words. Poetry must be no longer than 4 pages. Art files cannot exceed 1MB. Please include each piece as separate attachments. Attachments must be in Microsoft Word (.doc), PDF, or JPEG for visual files. Please include a cover page for each piece containing: title of the piece, your name, address, phone number, and reliable email address. Your name should NOT appear anywhere else on the piece outside of the cover page. There is no limit to the num...

The Sylt Foundation calls all Writers of contemporary African literature to apply for the two month African Writer’s Residency, offered as part of the Sylt Foundation Residency Programme. One residency will be awarded annually to Africa writers who have published poetry, prose, plays and novels. The Foundation is located on the island of Sylt, off the coast of Hamburg, Germany. The Foundation’s residency programme has been running for several years offering opportunities to South African and international visual artists, writers and photographers. It is managed under the directorship of literary scholar and curator Indra Wussow. This African Writer’s Residency is aimed to offer a residency to writers of contemporary African literature, who are related to or engaging with contemporary themes and concerns of Africa and the African Diaspora. The award is open to published writers of poetry, prose, plays and novels. Following on the success of many years of engagement with contempor...

In The Africa Report Tuesday, Prince Ofori-Atta and Dagnachew Teklu wrote about what they called the world's most expensive election campaign as US voters hit the polls.  " The 2012 election campaign will go down in history as the first to record billions of dollars in campaign funding by the respective candidates. By October 17, 2012, the two candidates had declared over $2 billion in campaign funding," said Ofori-Atta and Teklu.  Other sources like OpenSecrets placed the total much higher. The Center for Responsive Politics in Washington calculated about $6 billion was spent by the presidential candidates and contestants for seats in the Senate and House of Representatives.  A day after the historic vote, a lot of pundits like Detroit Free Press' Brian Dickerson have the same verdict. The election proved money alone can't buy you victory. Below a professor of English and linguistics at Virginia state University pens similar thoughts in poem below: ...

  Vitabu is pleased to have Ahmed Koroma in our virtual room. Koroma just published a collection of poems that's garnered some great reviews. By day, he's a very left-brained analytical chemist. At night, his right brain comes alive. “Words matter,” says Freetown-born  Koroma, who attended two of the most famous schools in Sierra Leone’s capital city: St. Edwards Secondary and the Prince of Wales.  Later, he graduated from one of West Africa's most storied educational institutions, Fourah Bay College (FBC), with a bachelor of science (honors) in chemistry.   Koroma moved to America sometime in the 1990s for graduate studies and earned a master's in chemistry from California State University at Northridge. He still lives in California, from where he takes us on a virtual tour of his poetry set 5,000 miles away in his homeland, Sierra Leone. The nation was ravaged by war for almost a decade. Vitabu : Of Flour and Tears has garnered some great reviews...

Interested in a new book? read the subject line in an e-mail I got one slow Olympic day in August.  Opening it up it read: I've been browsing through your blog, and it looks like Timbuctoo might be of interest to you. It takes place in Africa, and was written by British author Tahir Shah who lives in Morocco. I thought I'd check to see if you might be interested. I've included some info below so you can decide whether it's something you'd like to read. Please let me know if you'd be interested in receiving a digital copy. I replied almost immediatley: With the Olympics winding down...Timbuctoo sounds like just the right book to dive into.  But after three weeks of reading my first Tahir Shah book, I still don't know what to make of it. One thing I was sure about as I clicked to the last page today was the ending is just what hard luck blues protagonist, Robert Adams, needed in a world with the odds stacked against him--put a foot wrong and you h...

As I pick up a dogeared book out of a basket, I wonder when my copy of  Ramadhan Ali's 1976  "Africa at the Olympics" will arrive. It's Monday in Baltimore and the London opening ceremony takes place in a few days. If Ali's title is anything to go by, it'd be an interesting peek into the history of the games from an African perspective but there's no doubt Africa is at the Olympics . So I thought that was a good way to break the dry spell on Vitabubooks. Baltimore's had some heat lately but the dog days of summer were only partly  responsible for the drought. Vb's had "book famine"-- a sensational condition brought on by more than a hundred and one reasons. So to help get our groove back, we're going to ease in with stories that made the Caine Prize list. As you probably know, Nigeria's  Rotimi Babatunde won the 13th annual Caine Prize for African Writing ,   described as Africa’s leading literary award, for his short story enti...

Novelist, poet, literary scholar and essayist Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Nairobi Heat (Penguin, SA 2009, Melville House Publishing, 2011), an anthology of poetry titled Hurling Words at Consciousness (AWP, 2006) and is a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa magazine.  He was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2009.  In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Penguin Prize for African Writing for his novel manuscript, The First and Second Books of Transition . Editions of Nairobi Heat are forthcoming in Kenya (East African Publishers) and Nigeria (Cassava Republic Press). Finding Sahara , the sequel to Nairobi Heat is forthcoming. Mukoma will be joining Cornell University in the fall of 2012 as an Assistant Professor of English specializing in 20th-century Anglophone African literature. Below is an e-mail interview with Mukoma. Vitabubooks : What drew you to Nairobi Heat ? Where did you get the information or ideas? Mukoma Wa Ngugi : I...