Hussain Ahmed Wins the BWR’s 2024 Poetry Contest
The Black Warrior Review Magazine has announced Hussain Ahmed as the BWR’s 2024 Poetry Contest winner.
In a post on social news platform X (FKA Twitter), the Black Warrior Review announced Hussain Ahmed as the winner for his poem “Song of Summer.” The award-winning writer, Donika Kelly, and University of Iowa professor selected the poem, calling it “inviting.”
Hussain Ahmed wrote in his artist statement:
“The poem examines how repetition enhances or alters the concept of the African drums and celebrations. The Yoruba chorus in the poem was the nucleus for what became the Song of Summer. It was also partly because I am interested in the colorful nature of the many Nigerian cultures.”
BWR will publish Song of the Summer in issue 51.2, available in early 2025.
Read: Ways to Make Money from Writing Poetry.
Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian poet and environmentalist, known for his collection Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile, which was a 2023 honoree by the Society of Midland Authors and a finalist for the Luchei Prize for African Poetry. His second collection, Blue Exodus, won the 2022 Orison Poetry Prize. Hussain’s work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Electric Lit, A Public Space, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.
About the Black Warriors Review Magazine
Established in 1974 by graduate students in the MFA Program in Creative Writing, Black Warrior Review is named for the river that borders the campus of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The city, the river, and the magazine all derive their names from the 16th-century Indigenous leader Tuskaloosa (also spelled “Tushkalusa”), whose name comes from two words of Creek or Choctaw origin—Tasca, meaning “warriors,” and lusa, meaning “black.”
BWR publishes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and art twice yearly. Contributors include Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners alongside emerging writers.
