Chris Abani is a novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. Born in Nigeria to an Igbo father and English mother, he grew up in Afikpo, Nigeria, received a BA in English from Imo State University, Nigeria, an MA in English, Gender, and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. He has resided in the United States since 2001. His fiction includes The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song For Night, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, GraceLand, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections are Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me The Sun: Collected Long Poems, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne’s Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He is the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the PEN Hemingway Book Prize, and a Guggenheim Award.
“A fascinating meditation on identity that explores the novelist’s
own mixed heritage and mixed feelings . . . A true citizen of the
world . . . With great insight and compassion, Abani reveals that
behind his—and every—face are unseen scars.”
—Porter Shreve, San Francisco Chronicle
“Abani’s story is insightful, moving, and a strong case for
exploring and publishing new forms of creative nonfiction.”
—Adam Morgan, Chicago Review of Books Best Nonfiction Books of
2016
“[H]is work is ‘against forgetting’ . . . The result, nonetheless,
is a powerful, honest and deeply poetic accounting of the formation
of a life . . . Abani’s exploration of personal, familial and
cultural identities, all situated in conversation with questions of
larger social significance, have created a work of great depth,
compassion and insight.”
—Hope Wabuke, The Guardian
“I devoured it a single sitting. It’s light and easy, and also
heavy and thought-provoking. It’s not exactly a memoir, but it’s a
moving and funny account of inhabiting what Esi Edugyan calls the
‘yes, but where are you really from?’ question.”
—Aaron Bady, The New Inquiry
“Chris Abani describes his face as ‘a mixture of two races, of two
cultures, of two lineages’ (he was born in Nigeria to an Igbo
father and English mother), writing with humor, anguish and
acceptance about ancestry and family and ‘wearing’ his father's
face.”
—Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Abani sees his face as both the reflection of the lives that came
before his and the lives that have grown together with his, and as
the repository of every touch, every gift of warmth, every
interaction, every experience of love…. And though Abani ties his
contribution up neatly at the end, he doesn’t let the readers off
easy. His story is the hardest to piece together in a chronological
sense, making it the most difficult to follow narratively; he
reveals much, emotionally, but very little in the way of facts or
details. In one way, we learn much more about him than the others,
but in terms of facts and chronology, we learn much less.”
—Sharrona Pearl, Public Books
“Chris Abani is easily one of most important voices in literature
today.”
—Bhakti Shringarpure, Warscapes
“What do our faces say about us — and how much of what they say is
fair? That’s one of the questions posed by Restless Books’s
intriguing new series The Face, in which writers use their own
countenances as launchpads into the imaginative stratosphere . .
. in Chris Abani‘s Cartography of the Void, part of the
series’s inaugural triptych (along with short works by Ruth Ozeki
and Tash Aw), we’re not disappointed . . . Can we dismiss the
significance of our faces when they bear so strongly the marks of
who we were as much as who we are? It could seem like a pessimistic
question. But Abani isn’t pessimistic. Seeing his father in himself
is troubling but it also opens up a path to understanding. And so
it is that he can hope: ‘That my face, and my father’s face, and
his father’s face before him will blaze in an unending lineage of
light and forgiveness.’”
—Charles Arrowsmith, House of SpeakEasy
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