AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT

Okey Ndibe

Okey Ndibe (first name is produced as "Okay") is the author of two novels, "Foreign Gods, Inc." (named one of the best books of 2014 by, among others, Janet Maslin of the New York Times, National Public Radio, Philadelphia Inquirer, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Mosaic magazine), and "Arrows of Rain", a memoir, "Never Look an American in the Eye" (winner of the 2017 Connecticut Book Award for non-fiction), and "The Man Lives: A Conversation with Wole Soyinka on Life, Literature, and Politics". He is also co-editor (with Zimbabwean writer, Chenjerai Hove) of "Writers Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa". His career as an author began after he affirmed African American writer John Edgar Wideman's hunch that he was working on a novel. Ndibe was a 2015-2016 Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He earned MFA and PhD degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and has taught at St. Lawrence University, Brown University, Trinity College, Simon's Rock College, Connecticut College, and the University of Lagos (as a Fulbright scholar). He was the founding editor of African Commentary, a US-based international magazine published by the novelist Chinua Achebe. He was a member of the editorial board of Hartford Courant, the oldest continuously published newspaper in the US, where his journalism won national and state awards. Ndibe's essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, BBC online, Financial Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera online, The Mail & Guardian (South Africa), Fabian Society Journal, and saharareporters.com. For more than fifteen years he wrote a widely syndicated weekly column on Nigerian politics and culture. He is currently working on a novel titled "Native Tongues".