The grant will help fund a three-year collaboration in the curation and promotion of African poetry at institutions across Africa, the UK and the United StatesĐăng Nguyễn / Unsplash

The head librarian at Cambridge’s African Studies Department, Jenni Skinner, has praised a $750,000 (£540,000) donation to the African Poetry Digital Portal as “a significant moment in our approach to anti-racism and decolonisation work”.

Skinner, part of the international team behind the Portal, will be one of the researchers supported by the grant given by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a leading supporter of the arts and humanities in the US. The grant will help fund a three-year collaboration in the curation and promotion of African poetry at institutions across Africa, the UK and the United States.

The Cambridge Centre of African Studies Library, which Skinner manages, is home to a specialised collection of African literature.

Jenni Skinner said that the “energy surrounding this project is tangible, and will present opportunities for our scholars and students to explore and engage with African poetry and poets who will not have previously been centred at this scale in our institution.

“This important collaboration comes at a significant moment in our approach to anti-racism and decolonisation work, by bringing together scholarly expertise and remarkable collections from across the University to the benefit of the world. This is a truly inspiring project.”

The African Digital Poetry Portal was founded in 2017 by the African Poetry Book Fund and has published nearly 100 African poets in the past six years.

The portal collaborates with institutions including the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford in the UK; the Library of Congress in the United States; the University of Cape Town in South Africa and the University of Ghana, and aims to provide access to “biographical information, artifacts, news, video recording, images and documents related to African poetry.”


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The grant will help support 11 undergraduate research stipends at collaborating institutions, as well as provisions for expanding the digital archive internationally.

Kwame Dawes, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the United States and research lead, hopes to bring to light the long tradition of poetry and poetic practices in African societies and says the portal is designed to “give poets a chance to engage this tradition as part of their understanding of poetic form and practice.

“It has been a tremendous honor to form partnerships with individuals from such venerable institutions from around the world”, he added.