Uche nduka biography examples
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Meet Uche Nduka, a professor connecting art and life
From the time Uche Nduka grew up in Nigeria, he always felt imaginative. This, along with an appetite for literature, led him toward a career in writing.
Now he is an English professor at Queens College and believes an artist’s life should reflect his work.
“From the moment I wake up in the morning, I leave myself open for inspirational things to come to me,” Nduka said.
Nduka draws inspiration from everything. His thoughts, dreams and conversations are eventually written down.
“You, as an artist, are a vessel through which things come. It’s not all the time you decide what to write about. People think you have to write about politics, about dictators, about religious fundamentalist [and] about crises,” Nduka said. “I feel as a human being, I am open to the heritage of humanity, and that means I can also write about pleasure, joy and beauty.”
Nduka wrote poetry books like Flower Child, released in 1988, and Ijele, released in 2012. He also won awards like the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize in 1997.
During his career, communities of artists have always supported him. He is friends with playwrights, songwriters, musicians, poets and filmmakers.
In Nigerian literature, writers like Chinua Achebe wr
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Our poetry redactor, Joe Throb, has preferred three poems brush aside Uche Nduka for his series that brings contemporary poetry count up the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
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Up figure up the Lofty Dive
up persuade the feeling of excitement dive
depiction showdown a cannonball unite hot pursuit
blue veins medic ditch
open to amyl nitrate
lemurs fly trigger warning
stress show support & to the present time here i am
i own never antiquated overawed exceed aimlessness
steer clear of finishing what’s in doubtful glass without
renouncing biped stimulus proactive crepuscular
without once depressed a footstep i am amenable
to colonnades that further me bam bam
drop the make a call espionage is a fucking joke
that’s come to an end foxtrot roll revolve the crocus
threw away representation icebox & snoozed on account of love
conformist to paint toboggan
a as a rule where a church wholly blared
i hate maxim that stillness counts but it does
the lasso depiction fire emblematic the creamy rose the pressure
of act crew happens when a duologue happens
is want the harmonize thing considerably a caress?
twisting around what the coalition posits
if that is repurposing why update we running?
legend paints address faces
deuce karmas diffused into extent other
what trace of attachment is something remaining one’s regard in it?
tanks? lock away camps? oeuvre is categorize only bring forward fat move backwards and forwards
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Uche Nduka was born in Nigeria in the 1960s and is bilingual in Igbo and English. His poetic work has also been translated into German, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, and Romanian. After living in Germany and Holland, he moved to the United States in 2007, where he has been teaching and publishing ever since, as well as cultivating a reputation for creative fearlessness and a cadre of unshakable admirers. The Poetry Foundation writes, “Nduka’s work is notable for its surrealist energy and political urgency.”
Nduka uses innovative techniques to challenge the reader while investigating what he calls unexplored linguistic trenches. Instead of repulsion, the reader learns to trust this destabilizing experience, riding with it into vast new perspectives that range in focus from the quotidian assurance of a lover’s embrace to the bilious taste of sudden political violence. Nduka has thrilled readers over numerous splendidly received prose and poetry titles, including eel on reef (2007), Ijele (2012), Nine East (2013), Living in Public (2018), and most recently, 2020’s Facing YouSCISSORWORK.
Uche Nduka’s SCISSORWORK is a piercing adventure through fragmented and recombined political landscapes, shearing and weaving together American and Nigerian histories of resistance throug