Creative Writing Program Graduate Student O-Jeremiah Agbaakin Receives the 2025 John Lewis Writing Grant for Poetry

The John Lewis Writing Grants are inspired by the late civil rights icon and are awarded annually by the Georgia Writers Association in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screen-playwriting. These grants are awarded to emerging Black or African-American writers living in Georgia as a means to elevate, encourage, and inspire the voices of Black writers in Georgia. O-Jeremiah Agbaakin won in the poetry category of the fifth edition of the grant to support his ongoing creative and scholarly projects.

Olatunde Osinaike, the 2024 Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry judged in the poetry category among other judges, Robert Gwaltney (fiction), Neesha Powell-Ingabire (Non-Fiction), and Ariel Hairston (Screen-writing).

Judge Olatunde Osinaike’s Citation: 
The great and honest deal about love is in how it can touch, effect, and disarm anyone. No peril nor politic is greater. It is but a small fact seen throughout the work of O-Jeremiah Agbaakin, who does not shy away from “the conditions of isolation and alienation” but instead vocalizes this marginalization through a sonnet corona which questions our contributions to displacement and our shared yet warped sense of nativity. The spirit of this grant takes after a man who was more than aware of the deprived and visceral effects this world can condition people with many times over. It was in this cycle that John Lewis chose to champion redemption and faith in ways that ever-expanded our living. Agbaakin, too, embodies a dismantling and renewal through work that makes a home in us all.

O-Jeremiah Agbaakin is the author of The Sign of the Ram (APBF/Akashic Books, 2023), selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation African Poets Chapbook series. His poems and reviews are published/forthcoming in Poetry Review (UK), Kenyon Review, POETRY Magazine, TRANSITION, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He’s received the John Lewis Grant and the Fine Art Work Center Fellowship from Georgia Writers Association/, and support from Good Hart Artist Residency, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Bread Loaf, Key West Literary Seminar, and Tin House; and was a finalist for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He is a doctoral student of Creative Writing and Literature at University of Georgia where he’s won the Graduate Research Award from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, among other honors.