JK Anowe

About JK Anowe

JK Anowe is an Igbo poet who was born in the early ‘90s to a family of yam farmers in Issele-Uku, Nigeria—a sleepy Southeastern town where the earth is the color of rust and roofs rarely reflect the sun. In search of better economic prospects, his parents moved the family to Jos, where interreligious riots repeatedly upended his childhood, embedding violence into everyday life. In the process of writing, JK discovered that the violence he experienced at home was mirrored by the structural and state violence he witnessed throughout his childhood and adolescence; a parallel that, in the fragmentation of poetry, he collapses. 

JK’s work, which won the Festus Iyayi Award for Excellence in Poetry when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Benin, has also been awarded the Brittle Paper award, nominated for multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, and published in newspapers and journals including the Chicago Reader, Gulf Coast, and Palette Poetry. His poems are both political and psychological. In 2017, he coined the term “schizo-poetry,” naming lyricism that imitates neurodivergent thinking, and, inadvertently, the kind of language available to everyday people living under dictatorship. When he immigrated to the United States in 2021, he discovered for the first time how it felt to write without censorship about the ongoing effects of history on his people. 

At Northwestern’s Litowitz MFA+MA program, where JK is a Gwendolyn M. Carter Fellow in African Studies, he is pursuing scholarship on Igbo history, philosophy, and religion under the guidance of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, Guggenheim fellow Chris Abani, and postcolonial scholar Evan Mwangi. After graduation, he will build on his MA thesis and pursue a PhD in English and African Studies to study how postcolonial writers are reinventing African storytelling traditions in our globalized world. It is his goal that his poetry encourages a new generation of thinkers who are invested in preserving African history, literature, and philosophy.

JK is building on experiences as assistant poetry editor of The Nation, poetry editor of Sycamore Review, and chapbooks editor of Praxis Magazine Online in his role as interviews editor of 20.35 Africa. He hopes his work as an editor will make a mark on literature at large by uplifting the Black authors who engage indigenous African traditions and their impact on contemporary life.