The African Poetry Book Fund will be hosting a researchathon event to crowdsource bibliographic items on two very influential African poets of the 20th and 21st Century, one from the Francophone field of African poetry and the other from the Anglophone field: Tanella Boni and Kofi Awoonor.

This event is part of an ongoing project of the African Poetry Digital Portal that aims to build large-scale bibliographies on the life and work of Africa’s major poets.

Kofi Awoonor (1935–2013) was a diplomat and a professor of comparative literature at numerous universities, including the University of Ghana. He is the author of several volumes of poetry, including Night of My Blood; Ride Me, Memory; The House by the Sea; and The Latin American and Caribbean Notebook. His collected poems (through 1985) were published in Until the Morning After.

Tanella Boni is an Ivorian poet, novelist, and professor of philosophy at the University Félix Houphouët-Boigny, formerly the University of Abidjan (Cocody). She has published numerous critical and literary works in French and won many literary awards, including the 2009 Antonio Viccaro International Poetry Prize from UNESCO for her body of work.

The African Poetry Digital Portal will be a gateway, providing access to and details of digital and print book manuscripts, newspapers and periodicals, newsletters, audio recordings, video recordings, websites, critical commentaries and bibliographies, and related collections of African poetry written by Africans from antiquity to the present. It will also feature curated digital projects on various aspects of African poetry.

This is a great opportunity for scholars and students to contribute to the important scholarship which will be live on the African Poetry Digital Portal.

HOW TO JOIN:

Visit http://zotero.org

Login in with the following username and password:

· Email: africanpoetrydigitalportal@unl.edu

· Password: UNLapdp123

Under Group Libraries, click the dropdown arrow on the left of APDP Born Bibliography to display the two subjects of our research:

· Kofi Awoonor

· Tanella Boni

Click the dropdown arrow next to one of the names for a full view of the categories and the subsections (Primary Works, Secondary Sources, Tertiary Sources, etc).

Pick a category you’d like to contribute to and begin your research! Note: We encourage you to begin with the categories and subsections that have the most gaps, but all are up for grabs.

For any questions, contact the African Poetry Digital Portal’s project manager, Rezina Habtemariam at rhabtemariam2@unl.edu.