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
Book review of (jopappy & the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk over at Washington Square Review
Along with the formal desire in bandele’s works to be material units forged by hands, and ones which carry the mark of their making on their body, it is important to pay attention to the outcome of this desire: what do these poems mean? We know how to read them, but when we are done, what are we left with? Students of poetry are often asked to read without looking for meaning. However, this exercise can be an institutional double edged sword; it is not a wrong way to read, but it can become grossly inadequate. In times when critiques of style and idiosyncratic craft choices are denied to artists of color (in favor of reading them into an identity catalogue), jopappy shows a way out of the double bind of meaning and experimentation: “just be sensitive to it, suspend the ringing in your ears, you are the metaphor in this corner you backed yourself into.”
Book review of under the aegis of a winged mind for Good River Review
By Lynnell Edwards
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).
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
(last piano voicings of a monarch)
from under the aegis of a winged mind
This reading was featured in ANMLY Vol. #29