Tsitsi Jaji

Tsitsi Jaji is a poet and scholar from Zimbabwe. She is the author of two books of poetry, Beating the Graves (2017) awarded honorable mention for the 2015 Sillerman Prize; and Carnaval, (2014) a chapbook in the New Generation African Poets box set. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies and in journals including Black Renaissance Noire, Prairie Schooner, Bitter Oleander, New Coin, Jalada, Illuminations, Madison Review, and the anthology women: migration: poetry (2017). She has read at the Poetry Foundation, Library of Congress, and United Nations, among others. Her poetry ranges across many aesthetic and thematic categories, but often engages with the experience of living in the new African diaspora, human rights, music, and formal experimentation. She is currently at work on a collection, Daughtering, from which she will read some new poems.

In addition to her work as a poet, Jaji is an associate professor of English at Duke University. She previously taught at University of Pennsylvania and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mellon Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and National Humanities Center. Her book, Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford), won the African Literature Association’s First Book Prize, as well as honorable mentions from the American Comparative Literature Association and Society for Ethnomusicology. The book traces how exchanges between African American, Ghanaian, Senegalese and South African artists shaped cultural and political liberation projects.