Areas I Teach
Chris Abani is an acclaimed novelist and poet. His fiction includes The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song for Night, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, GraceLand, and Masters of the Board. His most recent poetry collection, Smoking the Bible (Copper Canyon, 2022), won the University of North Texas Rilke Prize and was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection. His other poetry collections are Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me The Sun: Collected Long Poems, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne’s Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. His nonfiction book, The Face: Cartography of the Void, was published in 2014. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, an Edgar Prize, a Ford USA Artists Fellowship, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, a Prince Claus Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honors. Born in Nigeria, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Board of Trustees Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He lives in Chicago.