In keeping with our commitment to being a clear and consistent home for immigrant writing, we have established The Black Lawrence Fellowship for New Immigrant Authors.
We are pleased to announce the second recipient of our fellowship, Kasimma.
2026 FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENT
Kasimma is from Igboland—obodo ndị dike!
She is the author of All Shades of Iberibe (2021). Its Croatian translation is titled, Portret Za Dar-mar (2022).
Kasimma has been awarded residencies at Wole Soyinka Foundation, Nigeria; Faberllull, Spain; Sinthian Cultural Center, Senegal; and Study Abroad in Lebanon. She is an alumna of the 2018 Short Stories Day Africa Flow Workshop, 2018 International Writing Program (IWP) Writing Workshop, 2019 Purple Hibiscus Creative Writing workshop, and others.
She is a Humanities Graduate Fellow at the University of Utah and the 2022 Nikky Finney fellow, for outstanding writing, at the University of Kentucky.
She was born in Jos, hails from Achina, and lives in Abuja.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
In the early 1300s Igboland (present-day southeastern Nigeria), Ideka (20) garners more fame than all the deities, their oracles, and revered eminences, put together. A speck of a girl decked in jute, musket, chakram, and knife, Ideka is a fierce hunter, forged in the violence of the wild. She learns fighting from wrestling carnivores, medicine from ailing omnivores, safety from avian calls. As far as Ideka is concerned, the budding misogynistic laws are arrant nonsense; a woman’s place is exactly that place she wants it to be. Her sole rule remains: an eye for, not two eyes, not five, one eye. For instance, when Oshamba, drunk on male privilege, burns her only hut, she sneaks into his compound of myriad huts and burns only one. However, when Ideka does the unthinkable—going to the males’ stream, an act they say is capable of raising the dead and arming them with whips with which to flog the country extinct—she is arrested and, this time, taken to the court of last resort, the ụmụada women’s court.
Her Name is Ideka is a re-collection and re-membering of the unsung, fascinating slices of Igbo history.
EXCERPT
I knew they would come when I awoke to a Python in my hut. I knew the females would come because the Python I awoke to was quite long for a Royal Python and bulged at the midsection; gravid, I dare say. I awoke to her elongated neck and white ventral side. The Python was only a sniff away from my face when my sleepy eyes registered a standing, not hanging, fat, upward-writhed, white rope. I pulled back until my wall impeded further movement. The Python majestically lessened in height, climbed on top her coiled form, and slithered out through a small hole under my door. She must have thinned herself to pass through that hole, I dare say!
My window blades sliced the bright moonlight into strands, the only illumination in my hut. I opened the louvre and caught the last part of the Python’s body and tail just before the mouth of the forest swallowed her. It’s true then. Or is this a dream? I dreamt about a Snake, did I not? In that dream, I watched two sleeping, quilted logs, one of them being my very self, yes or no?