Five poets all from Nigeria will be attending the Ibadan Poetry Foundation 2016 Residency. They are Lydia Ibinike Osinowo, Winifred Binogun, Akwu Sunday Victor, Minalisa Chiamaka and Stanley Princewill McDaniels.
The Ibadan Poetry Foundation has announced the recipients of the residency in Ibadan (Oyo State) which will begin in late November. The five were selected from thirteen initial participants who had taken part in the initial phase of the mentorship which was conducted online. The poets will be involved in intensive writing, meeting other writers, and visiting historic sites within and outside the city. It is expected that they will use the period of their residency to compose more poems, improve on their creativity and publish their poetry.
Remi Raji, the director of IBPF, congratulated all the thirteen participants for being part of a new movement in contemporary Nigerian literary tradition. He noted that the organisation would have loved to bring in all the mentees of the first online residency programme to Ibadan, but for the reasons of logistics, it could only accommodate five at the initial instance. The foundation however, believes that all the mentees have created successful relationships with their mentors, for continuous grooming and eventual independence. He further stated that “for this project is a lofty one, we will strive to break borders of constraints, and we will work towards building a new generation of writers dedicated to the vital significance of poetry as education, as enlightenment, as beauty and as the refinement of the mind.”
The 2016 IBPF Mentorship/Residency Programme was launched this year, and from about a hundred entries, a shortlist of 13 poets emerged for mentorship by five established poets over the course of six weeks. The programme which would be an annual event will offer emerging poets an opportunity to be mentored by established, award-winning poets with longer years of practice, as they move into the next stage of their artistic practice. The mentors of the 2016 IBPF include Tade Ipadeola, Uche Umez, Unoma Azuah, Jumoke Verissimo, and Remi Raji.
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