Join us to celebrate Olatunde Osinaike’s prize-winning collection, Tender Headed. This IRL poetry reading will feature two Houstonian authors, Ayokunle Falomo and Joshua Burton!
Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Olatunde Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, and software developer. He is the author of Tender Headed (Akashic Books, 2023), selected by Camille Rankine as winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, in addition to the limited edition chapbooks Speech Therapy, which won the Atlas Review’s chapbook contest, and The New Knew (Thirty West). Other honors include winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and Frontier Industry Prize, semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, and honorable mention for the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Award in Poetry. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Poetry Daily, Lit Hub, Best New Poets, 20.35 Africa, New Poetry from the Midwest, Obsidian, Kweli, Wildness, and elsewhere. His work has received fellowships and support from Poets & Writers, Hurston/Wright Foundation, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. He lives in Atlanta and would like to thank you.
Joshua Burton is a poet and educator from Houston, TX and received his MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. He is a 2019 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar, 2019 Juniper Summer Writing Institute scholarship winner, 2019 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics fellowship finalist, received the Honorable Mention for the 2018 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, 2020 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing finalist, and a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient. His work can be found in Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Conduit, TriQuarterly, Black Warrior Review, Grist, and Indiana Review. His chapbook Fracture Anthology is currently out with Ethel and his debut poetry collection Grace Engine is out with the University of Wisconsin Press.
Ayokunle Falomo is Nigerian, American, and the author of AFRICANAMERICAN'T (FlowerSong Press, 2022), two self-published collections and African, American (New Delta Review, 2019; selected by Selah Saterstrom as winner of the New Delta Review's 8th annual chapbook contest). A recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, MacDowell, and the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program, where he obtained his MFA in Creative Writing - Poetry, his work has been anthologized and widely published in print and online publications including The New York Times, Houston Public Media, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Texas Review, New England Review, and Write Among Now among others.