Prof. Romeo Oriogun's The Gathering of Bastards is a Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award!

Many congratulations to Professor Romeo Oriogun! His book of poetry—The Gathering of Bastards—is a finalist for the 2025 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award!

This recognition of Prof Oriogun's work is the most recent in a growing list of prestigious nominations and awards.The Gathering of Bastards is the 2023 Julie Suk Award Winner, the 2024 Nebraska Book Award Winner, a finalist for both the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and was on the shortlist for the
Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry.

You can read more about The Gathering of Bastards at the U. of Nebraska, and read Adesiyan Oluwapelumi's review of Oriogun's The Gathering of Bastards, titled "The Geo-Politics of Identity Has a New Witness" in The Republic (August 4, 2024).

An excerpt of Oluwapelumi's review:

The poems in Romeo Oriogun’s sophomore poetry collection, The Gathering of Bastards, build their worlds from the sea, a now recurring motif in Oriogun’s work, evident in his past collection, Nomad, which won the 2022 Nigeria Prize for Literature. Following in the footsteps of Nomad, The Gathering of Bastards has been shortlisted for the 2024 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. In this collection, Oriogun and his speakers serve as witnesses, traversing corporeal, sexual, mental, spiritual and political borders to explore themes of departure, remembrance and wandering. Everything in the collection migrates through borders, invisible or visible. Every boundary beckons to be crossed, abolished, or established. Oriogun achieves this through poetics that wrestle with the definition of home, centering the meaning of belonging around the concept of communalism—a conflict between self-ownership and societal ownership.  [ . . . ]