Kofi Anyidoho (born 25 July 1947) is a Ghanaianpoet and academic who comes from a family tradition of Ewe poets and oral artists.[1][2] He is currently Professor of Literature at the University of Ghana.[3][4]
He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including the Valco Fund Literary Award, the Langston Hughes Prize, the BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Award, the Fania Kruger Fellowship for Poetry of Social Vision, Poet of the Year (Ghana), and the Ghana Book Award.[5]
Having trained as a teacher at Accra Training College and at the Advanced Teacher Training College-Winneba, he taught primary, middle and secondary school, before joining the University of Ghana-Legon. Currently the Professor of Literature in the English Department, he has also been Director of the CODESRIA African Humanities Institute Program, acting Director of the School of Performing Arts and Head of the English Department.[3][7] He was installed as the first occupant of the Kwame Nkrumah Chair in African Studies at the University of Ghana on 18 March 2010.[1][8]
Poetry
Kofi Anyidoho's poetry is respected as distinct in the way he weaves modernity into tradition and inspires hope by extending the three-chord rope of Ewe oral tradition.[9] He not only writes with the background of Ewe oral tradition experiences but also enacts the very performance and oration of his poems in griotic style.[10][11]
Elegy for the Revolution (1978)
A Harvest of Our Dreams (1985), Heinemann (paperback 1998), ISBN0-435-90261-X
^Mensah, Augustine N. (2011). "The Place We Call Home and Other Poems: A Review Article". Legon Journal of the Humanities. 22: 177–188 – via Africa Journals Online.