Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by Olatunde Osinaike to discuss his debut collection, Tender Headed. Olatunde is in conversation with Emily Holland, poet and editor of Poet Lore.
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Originally from the West Side of Chicago, Olatunde Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, and software developer. He is the author of Tender Headed (Akashic Books, 2023), selected by Camille Rankine as winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, in addition to the limited edition chapbooks Speech Therapy, which won the Atlas Review’s chapbook contest, and The New Knew (Thirty West). His collection was also runner-up for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for the Alice James Award and CAAPP Book Prize. Other honors include winner of the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize and a Frontier Industry Prize, semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, and honorable mention for the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Award in Poetry. His work has received fellowships and support from Poets & Writers, Hurston/Wright Foundation, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University. He received his BS in Engineering from Vanderbilt University and his MS in Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Atlanta and would like to thank you.
About the Book
Selected by Camille Rankine as winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, Tender Headed is a musical and formally playful meditation on Black identity and masculinity
The irony of transformation often is that we mistake it to have occurred long before it does. Examining the themes of Black identity, accountability, and narration, readers will encounter a series of revealing snapshots into the role language plays in chiseling possibility and its rigid command of depiction in Tender Headed. Olatunde Osinaike’s startling debut sorts through the many-minded masks behind Black masculinity. At its center lies an inquiry about the puzzling nature of relationship, how ceaseless wonder can be in its challenge of a truth. In the name of music and self-identity, the speaker weaves their way through fault and how it amends Black life in America.