Library Of Africa and The African Diaspora

4-7 January 2023 | LOATAD Frafraha | In Person Only | Pay What You Want

Each workshop is designed to introduce writers to poetic elements of the selected Adinkra symbol and allow them an intimate space to generate stories, poems, and songs that reflect their own personal experiences or cultural heritage. Participants will leave with a single publishable/performance piece for the final reading on January 7, 2023.

For each workshop, participants are encouraged to bring a paper and pen. All additional materials will be provided.

Morning sessions: 10-12:30pm

Afternoon sessions: 4-6:30pm

FEE: Pay what you want- all payments will be used to fundraise for next year’s Adinkra Poetry Prize.

Adinkra Poetry Workshop 

January 4

Sankofa + Sonnets 

The sonnet is a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter, employing one of several rhyme schemes, and adhering to a tightly structured thematic organization. The name is taken from the Italian sonetto, which means “a little sound or song.”

Nyame Ye Ohene + Free Verse

Nonmetrical, nonrhyming lines that closely follow the natural rhythms of speech. A regular pattern of sound or rhythm may emerge in free-verse lines, but the poet does not adhere to a metrical plan in their composition.

January 5

Adinkrahene + Pantoum

The pantoum is a poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza serve as the first and third lines of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the same as the first.

Odo Nyew Fie Kwan + Elegy 

The elegy is a form of poetry in which the poet or speaker expresses grief, sadness, or loss.

January 6 

Osram ne Nsoromma + Origin Story

The Origin Story is a form of poetry in which the poet reimagines how they came to this earth/ how they are born. It often possesses mythical elements and asks the poet to enter spaces of the impossible.

FUNTUNFUNEFU-

DENKYEMFUNEFU  +Couplet  

The couplet, two successive lines of poetry, usually rhymed (aa), has been an elemental stanzaic unit—a couple, a pairing—as long as there has been written rhyming poetry in English. It can stand as an epigram­matic poem on its own, a weapon for aphoristic wit, as in Pope’s “Epigram Engraved on the Collar of a Dog which I gave to his Royal Highness” (1734).