Gbenga Adesina: Death Does Not End at the Sea – in Conversation with Fernando Valverde

Join us for an evening with Gbenga Adesina, who will read from his debut poetry collection, Death Does Not End at the Sea. A conversation with Fernando Valverde will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.

About the Book: In Gbenga Adesina's groundbreaking debut book of poems, a defiant and wise exploration of exile, voyages, and spiritual odysseys, we encounter nomadic figures embarking on journeys haunted by history-a son keeps dreaming he carried his dead father across the sea; a young Black father, tired of fear and breathlessness, travels with his son in search of the ghost of James Baldwin-to Paris, the south of France, Turkey, and Senegal to investigate his ancestral roots; and finally, a group of immigrants on small boats in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea sing in order not to drown, in a stunning sequence that invokes the Middle Passage. In a lyrical voice at once new and surprisingly ancient, Adesina's Death Does Not End at the Sea explores the complexity of elusive citizenship, an immigrant's brokenhearted prayer for a new beginning, a chorus of elegies, and a cosmic love song between the living and the dead.

About the Author: Gbenga Adesina, Nigerian poet and essayist, received an MFA in poetry from New York University, where he was a Goldwater Poetry Fellow and was mentored by Yusef Komunyakaa. He has received fellowships from Poets House in New York, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Colgate University, Folger Shakespeare Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Harvard University's historic Woodberry Poetry Room. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Guernica, Narrative, The Yale Review, The Best American Poetry, and The New York Times Magazine, among others. He won the 2020 Narrative Prize. He is the inaugural Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University and the cofounder and editor of A Long House, a journal of diasporic art, thought, and literature.

About the Moderator: Fernando Valverde is one of the preeminent poets writing in the Spanish language today, and he has received international acclaim for his contributions to the art of poetry. Before coming to the US, Valverde served as a foreign correspondent for Spain's major paper, El Pais, covering war zones in the Balkans and the Middle East. In 2014, his book The Insistence of Harm received the Book of the Year award from the Latino American Writers Institute at CUNY. His most recent bilingual book, America, was translated by poet Carolyn Forché and published by Copper Canyon Press. In Spanish, Los hombres que mataron a mi madre (Visor) is his most recent book. He has also published La Muerte de Adonais, with the prestigious publishing house Planeta and UNAM, on the life and death of Percy B. Shelley. He has been the director of the International Festival of Poetry in Granada, and he is currently a professor of poetry and Romanticism at the University of Virginia.