Tsitsi Jaji

Tsitsi Jaji is Helen L. Bevington Associate Professor of Modern Poetry with appointments in English and African & African American Studies. Her research ranges across literary and cultural studies, with special interests in music, poetry, and black feminisms. She is the author of several books of scholarship and poetry. Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford), won the African Literature Association’s First Book Prize, as well as honorable mentions from the American Comparative Literature Association and Society for Ethnomusicology. The book traces how exchanges between African American, Ghanaian, Senegalese and South African artists shaped cultural and political liberation projects. She has received fellowships in support of her research from the National Endowment for the Humanities/Schomburg Center, Mellon Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and National Humanities Center.

Jaji’s most recent poetry collection, Mother Tongues (2019) was awarded the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize. Both her first collection Beating the Graves (2017) and a chapbook, Carnaval (2014) were published through the African Poetry Book Fund with University of Nebraska Press. Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, Black Renaissance Noire, Almost Island, Prairie Schooner, Bitter Oleander, etc. and she has read at the Poetry Foundation, Library of Congress, and United Nations, among others. Several of her poems have been set to music by composers including B.E.Boykin, Stephen Jaffe, and Shawn Okpebholo.

Bio updated August 2025