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.