press + media

Excited to announce I was chosen as a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellow. Check out my profile on the NEA website. Here is a link to the announcement

Washington, DC—The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is pleased to announce the first round of recommended awards for fiscal year 2023, with more than $34 million in funding to support the arts nationwide. This is the first of the NEA’s two major grant announcements each fiscal year and includes grants to organizations through the NEA’s Grants for Arts Projects, Challenge America, and Research Awards categories. This announcement also includes grants to individuals for Literature Fellowships in creative writing (poetry) and translation. 

I am super excited to announce that my manuscript was chosen by Futurepoem as the winner of the 2022 Other Futures Award. The title of the collection is (jopappy & the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk.

Book review of under the aegis of a winged mind for Good River Review

The collection is a showcase for the symphony of forms innovated by contemporary Black poets: the “fret” (Mitchell H.L. Douglas); the “Golden Shovel” (Terrance Hayes); the “syncopated sonnet” (Tyhimba Jess); the “Gigan” (Ruth Ellen Kocher)…

By Lynnell Edwards

Mixed Media piece published over at Atticus Review

The Connecticut Poetry Society and Connecticut River Review 2021 Experimental Poetry Contest Winner is makalani bandele for his poem Afropessimism 101: Quiz on System of Weights used (1619-Present).

Artist Wendi Smith’s art work, “the six rivers run home,” resulted from her collaboration with poet makalani bandele.

University of Kentucky feature article about the award-winning collection under the aegis of a winged mind

MFA Student Makalani Bandele’s Abstract Approach to Poetry Takes Home Autumn House Prize

By Madison Dyment

Poem from under the aegis of a winged mind published at Third Point was a finalist in 2019 Best of the Net.


Interview I did with Caleb True over at Dynamo Verlag

CHRIS RICE COOPER’s BACKSTORY OF THE POEM feature on the poem: mary lou williams’s piano workshop (after Fred Moten)

This is a video from the interdisciplinary collaborative art project called the Vandals with videographer and photographer Andre’ Howard, musician and composer Chris Pitts, and poet makalani bandele. This video was published along with its attendant poem unit_75 by Poetry Northwest.
In a feature for Poets & Writers Page One, a reading of “earl of harlem meets the high priest of bebop” and “leit[blue]motif” from under the aegis of a winged mind, published in by September 2020 by Autumn House Press.
étude op. 11, no. 11
(last piano voicings of a monarch)
from under the aegis of a winged mind
This reading was featured in ANMLY Vol. #29
Writers & Books Visiting Author Series w/ Joy Priest
An interview I did with Katerina Stoykova to promote under the aegis of a winged on her Accents Radio program, a radio show for literature, arts and culture is a weekly program on WRFL 88.1 FM, Lexington.
Promo video shot by fellow Affrilachian Poet Bianca Spriggs as promo for the book hellfightin’