Okey Ndibe

Okey Ndibe teaches fiction and African literature at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and teaches a seminar in Africana literature at Brown University, Providence, RI. He is the author of the novel, Arrows of Rain, which has drawn praise from numerous critics and authors, including Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, John Edgar Wideman, and Michael Thelwell. U.K-based New Internationalist magazine described Arrows of Rain as “a powerful and gritty debut.” Ndibe, who has just finished a forthcoming novel titled foreign gods, incorporated, also co-edited (with Chenjerai Hove) Writers, Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa.

Ndibe, who earned an MFA and PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has taught at Connecticut College in New London, CT, Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, MA, and as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Lagos, Nigeria.

He served as the founding editor of African Commentary, a now defunct magazine published in the U.S. by novelist Chinua Achebe. From 2000 to 2001, he served on the editorial board of Hartford Courant where his piece, “Eyes to the Ground: The Perils of the Black Student,” won the 2001 Association of Opinion Page Editors award for best opinion essay in an American newspaper.

He contributes to several publications in the U.S., England, and elsewhere, including Financial Times, Hartford Courant, The Fabian Society Journal, BBC online, www.guernicamag.com and www.drunkenboat.com.

Ndibe is currently working on Doing Dutch In America, a memoir of his life in the US.