Tsitsi Jaji

Jaji's chapbook, Carnaval, appeared in the first New Generation African Poets box set, (African Poetry Book Fund/Slapering Hol, 2014), and her poems have appeared in Bitter Oleander, Prairie Schooner, Black Renaissance Noire, Madison Review, ElevenEleven, and elsewhere. She has given readings at the UNESCO, the Library of Congress, the United Nations, and the Poetry Foundation, and has taught writing workshops in her home country, Zimbabwe.

Jaji earns her living as an associate professor of English and African & African American Studies at Duke University. Her scholarly book, Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity, received the African Literature Association’s First Book Award. She is currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center, and has previously held fellowships at the Schomburg Center (NEH), the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell (Mellon). Her life is at its best, she says, when she finds time to practice the piano once a day. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband, cat, and sweet baby boy.

Read the author's introduction to Beating the Graves here. She may be seen reading two poems from the book in the videos that accompany them on PIW:
OUR EMBRACE
HOLY DEPARTURE Bibliography

Poetry
Carnaval. Chapbook. Seven New Generation African Poets / Slapering Hol Press, Sleepy Hollow, 2014

Criticism
Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014

Links
Poem ‘Pierrot’ in The Boston Review
Three poems in InTensions
‘The Seat in Front of Me’ broadside printed by The Center for Book Arts