An Evening with Tope Omoniyi

Date: 23 June 2015

Time: 19:00 - 20:00

Host: Ragged Claws

Please join us for a poetry craft talk with Nigerian-born, London-based poet and scholar Tope Omoniyi, Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Roehampton. In his professional research, he studies language and identity with a focus on popular culture, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, but he has also published on sociolinguistic identity in Hong Kong and Singapore. During his time at Singapore's National Institute of Education, he was deeply involved with the local poetry community, and his book of poetry, Farting Presidents & Other Poems, came out from Kraft Books in 2001. A few words about that book: ""In this witty but serious collection, the poet looks askance at injustices and pains of the present and recent past. In the title poem and others, he asks, 'how the hell/Chicken generals figured they could run a nation/From the DIY book of trash'." Tope will talk about and read from his new volume, Word-o-graphs: Photos in Verse, about which he says, "The stories that have fed these poems convey one reality or another. They’re only partly mine as a poet. They belong in part too to those persons, places and events whose voices ring through the words or prompted my telling these tales, and of course partly too to you my readers."