Othuke Umukoro will read from his debut poetry collection, Fenestration, selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss as the winner of the 2024 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and will be in conversation with Writers' Workshop graduate Reyumeh Ejue. Tracie Morris says of Fenestration, “Othuke’s heart-centric new work...is filled with tender poems of discovery. They stay with the reader long after the end of a page, and the book. The strength of these poems is in the refined delicacy of understanding, through dilated pupils, the bayonets’ knife’s edge. Both through the intimacy of complex love between father and son, and the sweeping and intimate pain of those Africans whose involuntarily journeys created the African diaspora we know today, we comprehend what it means to perceive the world through haunted, multi-century somatic knowing."

Othuke Umukoro, Nigerian poet and playwright, is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he won the Academy of American Poets University Poetry Prize. His debut poetry collection, Fenestration (Texas Review Press, 2025), was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss as the winner of the 2024 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Othuke won the prestigious Brunel International African Poetry Prize in 2021, has taught at the University of Iowa, was the judge for the 2024 Kofi Awoonor Poetry Prize, and was the inaugural X.J. Kennedy Poetry Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center.

Reyumeh Ejue's stories have been published in swamp pink, Subtropics, Agni, Notch, and The Hudson Review (where he won a fiction prize). He was also a finalist for the 2025 Witness Literary Magazine Prize for fiction.

_{To subscribe to a weekly emailing list of Writers' Workshop events, please fill in the linked form or email iww@uiowa.edu with “Events Mailing List Subscribe” in the subject line.
Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.}