Miller Aud-cast #15: Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie

Hello and welcome to Miller Aud-cast, Episode 15. In this episode, we feature the poet Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie, a notable entry in our 2020 Miller Audio Prize contest. Akosua Zimba Afiriyie-Hwedie is a Zambian-Ghanaian poet who grew up in Botswana. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. She is a Hopwood and Meader Family Award winner as well as a finalist of: The Brunel International African Poetry Prize, The Palette Poetry Spotlight Award, The Furious Flower Poetry Prize and Wick Poetry Center's Peace Poem contest. Akosua has received fellowships from Callaloo and the Watering Hole. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in: Obsidian, Birdcoat Quarterly, Wildness, Bettering American Poetry, WusGood?, and The Felt. She is currently working on her first poetry collection. In this series of rich, dazzling and evocative poems, Afiriyie-Hwedie strives with fierce and elegant success to articulate the body, to map it onto our moment, and to understand it as “a war,” “an open window, a loosening belt,” a project of construction in resistance to oppressive forces and open to pleasure that should be any body’s birthright. In the conflations of the divine and the gritty beauties of the material world, these poems call us to a higher understanding of ourselves, and of everyone else. Stay tuned for Miller Aud-cast #16, coming soon. And don’t forget, submissions are open now for the 2021 Miller Audio Prize. The deadline for this year’s contest is June 15. Learn all about it at our website, www.missourireview.com.