The 2021 Award for New Poets, 1st Place Winner: a sonnet: a slaughter field by Chibuihe Obi Achimba
By Chibuihe Obi Achimba | January 11, 2022
We’re all very excited to share with you the 1st Place Winner of the 2021 Award for New Poets, selected by judges Rosebud Ben-One, Andrés Cerpa, and Mai Der Vang. Please enjoy this modern epic by the singular Chibuihe Obi Achimba! Stay tuned this week for 2nd and 3rd place poems, by Samuel Piccone and Emily Hyland.
a sonnet: a slaughter field
“Has there ever been a country that, once
colonized, avoided civil war?”
—Roma Tearne
Chibuihe Obi Achimba
—Winner of the 2021 Award for New Poets—
Chibuihe Obi Achimba grew up in Southeastern Nigeria. He is a poet, essayist, and Founding-Editor of Dgëku Magazine. He served as the 2019 Harvard University Scholar At-Risk Fellow, a Visiting Poet in its English Department, and the 2020 Summer Visiting Artist at the Oregon Institute for Creative Research. Chibuihe has been awarded grants by PEN America, PEN International, Freedom House, and St. Botolph Club Foundation, which named him one of the 2021 Emerging Artists in New England. His writing has been published or forthcoming in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Harvard Review, Poet Lore, Foreign Policy Magazine, Guernica Magazine and several other prints and online journals. In August 2021, he was appointed to the editorial board of Transition Magazine at the Hutchins Center, Harvard. He is currently completing an MFA degree in Poetry at Brown University.
