Through our New Poet series, 20.35 Africa has worked to promote and give individual visibility to young, up-and-coming poets from the African continent. We have made a few changes to the guidelines and urge you to read them carefully before nominating poets for the series.
As usual, the editors select and spotlight a poet on our platform through a targeted social media campaign for the duration of a month. We seek to highlight poets with groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting writing; poets who offer new lenses through which to see and navigate the world; poets whose personal narratives enliven others; and poets who have minimal recognition. In the past four years, we have received nominations and featured works of emerging writers from different regions in the continent: Sudan, Congo, South Africa, Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria.
We are once again calling for 20.35 Africa’s readership and the greater African poetry community to nominate up-and-coming poets whose talents merit a wide audience. Nominations for the New Poets Series are open to the public on a rolling basis, and we encourage you to send us your freshest and most electric voices. The series will now run bi-monthly and is open to poets between the ages of 15 and 35.
Nomination Guidelines:
- To nominate a New Poet, send the poet’s name, up to 3 links to their published works (video and/or written), a batch of 5 unpublished poems, and if possible, their contact address to submissions@2035africa.org.
- For poets whose work cannot be found online, send a sample of up to 10 unpublished poems in a PDF document.
- Poets may nominate themselves for this series.
- The email subject should read “20.35 AFRICA NEW POETS SERIES NOMINATION.”
- We do not guarantee that we will feature every poet nominated for this series. However, we will give each nomination we receive equal consideration.
- Be rest assured that we will receive your nomination once it is sent in. We will only get back to those nominations we wish to feature. Therefore, don’t expect an acknowledgement of your nomination once you send them; our workload has doubled.
- We are accepting nominations on a rolling basis.