Maik Nwosu
Maik Nwosu is a Professor of English and
chair of the Department of English and Literary Arts at the
University of Denver, Colorado. He worked as a journalist (and
received the Nigeria Media Merit Award for Journalist of the
Year) before moving to Syracuse University in New York for a
Ph.D. in English and Textual Studies.
His research
areas include African, African Diaspora, postcolonial, and world
literatures, as well as semiotics and critical theory. Nwosu’s
poetry collection, Suns of Kush, was awarded the Association of
Nigerian Authors/Cadbury Poetry Prize in 1995. His novels,
Invisible Chapters and Alpha Song, received the Association of
Nigerian Authors Prose Prize and the Association of Nigerian
Authors/Spectrum Prose Prize in 1999 and 2002, respectively. A
Gecko’s Farewell, his third novel, was published by Parrésia in
2016. His poems and stories have appeared in Okike, Drumvoices
Revue, New Writing 14, Dublin Quarterly, El Ghibli, Fiction
International, and Agni. Nwosu’s academic essays have appeared
in several journals and books.
His book, Markets of
Memories: Between the Postcolonial and the Transnational (Africa
World Press, 2011), explores the travelling sign in the context
of cultural-ideological intersections, relating it to selected
works by Christopher Okigbo, Derek Walcott, James Joyce, and
Isabel Allende. His co-edited book, The Critical Imagination in
African Literature: Essays in Honor of Michael J. C. Echeruo,
was published by Syracuse University Press in 2015. The Comic
Imagination in Modern African Literature and Cinema: A Poetics
of Laughter, his study of Africa’s carnivalesque poetics of
laughter, was published by Routledge in 2016. Nwosu is a fellow
of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany; the
Civitella Ranieri Center, Umbertide, Italy; and the Stellenbosch
Institute for Advanced Study, Stellenbosch, South Africa. He is
also a member of the Phi Beta Delta Honor Society for
International Scholars.
Published Books

a geckos farewell
A Gecko’s Farewell is a novel about three Africans from
different parts of
the continent who meet in the spirit (online) and plan
to found a School of
Stories.
Etiaba, a village school teacher, loses his job and
moves to the capital
city and its world of prayer contractors and hope
merchants. Mzilikazi’s is
the story of the homeless spectre, the boy soldier, the
fugitive, the exile
– a black south African dislocated under the Apartheid
regime. Nadia is a
radical student of photography at the American
University in Cairo. She
becomes a photojournalist and takes the picture of an
Islamist terrorist, an
act that endangers her.
These three characters eventually escape from Africa,
but Africa is in a
sense inescapable.
