The Konya Shamsrumi blog is meant to be the curator of strictly original poetry content, from interviews to essays to guest poems and more

Konya Shamsrumi is a bit complex. Legally, it is a project of the Parrésia Foundation for Arts and Literature, a non-governmental organization Azafi Omoluabi-Ogosi and I set up in 2015. Administratively, it is its own creature, governed by consensus of all five members, with direction provided by a designated Editor, Kechi Nomu. It is affiliated to Parrésia Publishers Limited in that Konya Shamsrumi has adopted Parrésia’s insistence on quality of production and merged same with the unquestionable quality of the poets we are publishing. So, we use

It’s the natural evolution of my ongoing involvement with several initiatives, including the two you’ve mentioned. Parrésia Publishers Limited is centred onParrésia Books, the traditional publishing imprint for literary fiction and creative non-fiction. In five years, we’ve published a stable of powerful voices ranging from name recognition writers on the international scene to writers in Nigeria all of whom are extremely talented writers who bring something different to the table.

The roots of Jalada lie in the GRANTA Best of Young British Novelists/British Council/Kwani? workshop facilitated by Ellah Allfrey in Nairobi in 2014.

My attendance was paid for by the British Council. From there, we the participants decided to form a Collective and registered same as a Trust in Kenya. Publishing the Jalada anthologies is the major activity of Jalada Africa. We have met a lot of success, most recently with our Languages issue, and the Translations issue in which we made an original Kikuyu-language short story by Ngugi wa Thiongo available in 66 languages, most of them African, and counting. From Jalada, I formulated the idea of the collective as a means of organization suitable for governing the arts, balancing individual artistic creativity with the leverage of a group. Of course, Jalada Africa is what we call in Nigeria, an NGO or a Part C company. So, from these, I have taken core ideas. To these, I have added a financial model which I hope will be sustainable. For now though, I am still in the arena of Konya Shamsrumi, my shirt is off and I am making a showing for an idea I think should win.