December 10, 2018

D. M. Aderibigbe

Harvard Book Store welcomes local poet D. M. ADERIBIGBE for a discussion of his latest poetry collection, How the End First Showed.

Details

Crafting raw memories into restrained and compact verse, D. M. Aderibigbe traces the history of domestic and emotional abuse against women in his family. A witnessing son, grandson, nephew, and brother, he rejects the tradition of praise songs for the honored father, refusing to offer tribute to men who dishonor their wives.

Widening his gaze to capture the moral rhythms of life in Lagos, he embraces themes of love, spirituality, poverty, compassion, sickness, and death. Aderibigbe offers both an extended elegy for his mother and poems addressed to children of the African continent, poems that speak to the past that has made them.

About Author(s)

D.M. Aderibigbe is a Nigerian poet and educator whose first book, How the End First Showed, won the 2018 Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in The NationPoetry ReviewjubilatWorld Literature TodayNew American WritingPrairie SchoonerNinth LetterAlaska Quarterly ReviewColorado ReviewMichigan Quarterly ReviewNew Orleans ReviewRATTLE and elsewhere. He's received fellowships from The James Merrill House, Banff, OMI International Arts Center, Ucross Foundation, Jentel Foundation and Boston University where he received his MFA in Creative Writing as a BU fellow, and also received a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. This fall, he will become a Ph.D. student at Florida State University, Tallahassee.