Vitabu Books

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of  Half of a Yellow Sun , writes on Facebook: Coming May 14, 2013:  a powerful new novel: A story of love and race centered around a young man and woman from Nigeria who face difficult choices and challenges in the countries they come to call home. As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country. Ifemelu--beautiful, self-assured--departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze--the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor--had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as...

Beth Fish Reads is hosting the sixth What's in a Name challenge. On her blog, she writes that the challenge was originally started by a young blogger named Annie, who hosted it for two years. But when Annie decided to give up on being the host, Beth Fish Reads took over the challenge. Here's How It Works: Between January 1 and December 31, 2013, read one book in each of the following categories: A book with up or down (or equivalent) in the title: Deep down True, The Girl Below, The Diva Digs up the Dirt A book with something you'd find in your kitchen in the title: Loose Lips Sink Ships, The Knife of Never Letting Go, Breadcrumbs A book with a party or celebration in the title: A Feast for Crows, A Wedding in Haiti, Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness A book with fire (or equivalent) in the title: Burning for Revenge, Fireworks over Toccoa, Catching Fire A book with an emotion in the title: Baltimore Blues, Say You're Sorry, Dreams of Joy A book w...

The Endless Journey is a story of one man’s journey from a revolutionary to a renowned ICT [Information and communications technology] professional. It is written with great honesty, incorporating pathos and humor intended to ease some of the heart-breaking and chilling accounts. It is an interesting perspective of a slice of African history that has seldom been recorded in such a personal way. The book elaborates the author’s life as a poor black man in racially segregated Rhodesia and his subsequent journey from Rhodesia to join Robert Mugabe’s liberation movement in Mozambique. While in Mozambique, he lived in the refugee camps which were constantly under attack by the Rhodesians resulting in the death of his sister and thousands of others. When it was decided that the author would have to swap weapons for books, he ended up in Sierra Leone where he graduated with a bachelor of science degree in physics and went back to Zimbabwe. Circumstances in Zimbabwe that saw the deterior...

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...