Getting to Know Our 2024-25 Poetry Chapbook Prize Judge: An Interview with Olatunde Osinaike
As the submission deadline for our 2024-25 Poetry Chapbook Prize draws near, we would like to formally introduce our judge for this year’s contest, Olatunde Osinaike.
This year’s Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet whose most recent collection, Tender Headed, explores experiences of Blackness and masculinity. The following interview involves questions relating to his experience as an acclaimed poet, his writing process, and advice he has for writers on the rise.
Guest Judge Olatunde Osinaike
Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Olatunde Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, and software developer. Selected in 2024 as the Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, he is the author of Tender Headed (Akashic Books), winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, shortlisted for the Society of Midland Authors Award in Poetry and Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize.
He is also author of the limited edition chapbooks Speech Therapy (TAR) and The New Knew (Thirty West). Other honors include winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and Frontier Industry Prize, semifinalist for the Discovery Poetry Prize, and honorable mention for the Ploughshares Emerging Writer's Award in Poetry.
His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Literary Hub, The Slowdown, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best New Poets, 20.35 Africa, New Poetry from the Midwest, Obsidian, Wildness, and elsewhere. He lives in Atlanta and would like to thank you.
VP: First, I'd like to congratulate you on earning the title 2024 Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry! What does this award mean to you?
OO: It means a lot but I've been thinking a lot recently about responsibility in an era of influence, specifically what we do to honor ourselves in the midst of all else. The award is a particularly humbling one to receive because, admittedly, it came out of nowhere and I had no expectation of receiving it. There is a name for the feeling one gets, perhaps “satisfaction” but less true than that, when you achieve a thing but lose bits of yourself in your movement toward it. Having finished my book tour and initial boost of publicity and shine toward the book, I've been sitting with what I am outside of awards and what that does (because it does!) mean for my poetry moving forward. Hopefully the award works to be more of a lasting signum of where I am heading toward rather than what I am coming from.
VP: You've earned a BS in Engineering from Vanderbilt University, as well as an MS in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University. Given your history in STEM, I'm curious when and how you discovered your passion for poetry. What sparked your interest in writing?
OO: I was fortunate to gain momentum into the world of poetry alongside some brilliant writers who I happened to share space with. Writers like Lauren Saxon, Malcolm Friend, Bryan Byrdlong, and others helped me hone my own voice. It was at this same time that I was arriving at an understanding to honor the truest pursuit of my passions. There are known limits to what one might call “hard” sciences, not the least of which is materially found in how the mind is trained to maintain space for solutions, equations, and practical ideas. But I had a lot of impractical ones, too. Whereas I knew the expectation spoke to sacrifice the possible darling of poetry for the impending corporate complex, I simply believed that there was enough merit in writing for myself and holding space for those ideas in the meanwhile. As it turns out, the meanwhile has been far more than enough and presented with plenty more opportunities than I could've first dreamed.
VP: I found your poems, "Mercy, Mercy Me" and "Float" on The Collapsar's website recently. It's amazing how you've crafted your lines to include breaks for breath and moments for focus along with them, but I imagine each poem may have taken some time to fine tune. I'd like to ask what your process looks like when composing a poem, and at what point you begin to share your work with others.
OO: Thanks for that question! In all honesty, you have to write for yourself as much as the audience. The more personal, the less regretful. The breaths themselves, outside of what they do to parse the image, add to the curation of reflection which is what this book is largely moved by. I can speak for myself in saying that I, at least, know what it feels like to move past a feeling all too quickly because of all that is being thrown our way by the world, or how we choose to internalize. So the page became scratch paper in the sense of allowing me to get my heart out and order my mind after. The breaths, like my speaking, need not to be so hurried.
VP: Tell us a bit about your most recent publication, Tender Headed. It addresses the intersectional point between Blackness and masculinity. Would you expand on this a bit? Also, how does this collection differ from your previous work?
OO: I don't know that my work has large enough leaps between them to consider them separate or distinct in a lot of ways, but I think a lot of the poems in the first collection came in response to culture a la carte. Even when not in direct conversation with an iconic moment in the mind's eye, I think a lot, even now, about the rigor of returning to a place you once loved. Remembering all the old you brought into those moments and all the new you left with. In the same way, I think the way we are taught to maneuver social constructs buys into devaluing the rigor we must have when presented with a confrontation in concept or enchantment. What I do believe is that this latest collection holds confrontation a bit more intrinsically and lovingly than any of my previous work and, in a way, puts my past integrity of word and will to shame.
VP: Finally, do you have any words of wisdom you would like to share with emerging poets, especially to those of diverse backgrounds and identities?
OO: I had spent so much time trying to tune how and what I said that I had lost some of the why I began with in the first place. It's the same reason I am so glad to have the moment to spend time with these forthcoming manuscripts because it's part of the reason why I choose to return and associate with this practice at all. All the differences in me honor the differences in another and I think that wisdom arrives in all of us and it is by pure luck that we have the chances to walk with it and hopefully be better because of it.
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The submission deadline for our 2024-2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize is December 31, 2024. The winner will receive a $500 award and 25 copies of their chapbook, perfect bound in a full-color or black/white cover. For more information, please click here.
