How do our ancestors inhabit the world that they have abandoned? What is the place of our family in our hearts? Spend an evening with Ìfẹ́olúwa as he talks about his award-winning book of poetry, My Father Paints His Dreams on My Body, in conversation with acclaimed poet, Professor Barbara Hamby.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In this stunning debut collection, Ìfẹ́olúwa Àyàndélé reveals this interior world in which the past sings its lament in the present moment. The father is Àyàndélé’s connection to the deep past and his ancestors, who move through love and the Nigerian-Biafran war, but also through the luxuriant landscape of rivers and forests. How does one person balance the past and the present? Animals can show us the way of nature. Prayer can form a river of the soul as it chants, praises, and reveres the terrible beauty of this world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ifeoluwa Ayandele is from Tede, Nigeria. He is the author of My Father Paints His Dreams on My Body (2026), winner of the 2024 Moon City Poetry Award, published in Moon City Press at Missouri State University. His poetry has been shortlisted for the 2025 Poetic Justice Institute Editor's Prize for BIPOC Writers, the 2025 Glass Chapbook Series, the Wisconsin Poetry Series' Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prize, the 2024 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in Poetry, and the 2023 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. His work has been nominated for Best New Poets, The Pushcart Prize, and The Best of the Net. His recent work is published or forthcoming in Callaloo, Magma, Transition Magazine, Great River Review, Poetry Wales, Beloit Poetry Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Texas Review. He is a PhD student in Creative Writing at Florida State University. He has received support from the Obsidian Foundation (UK). You can find him on Instagram @Ifeoluwaayandele.
ABOUT BARBARA HAMBY
Distinguished University Scholar, MA, Florida State University (1981), specializes in poetry and fiction. She is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Burn (2025), Holoholo (2021, and Bird Odyssey (2018), all from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her novel, At the Mamba Room, will be published by Four Way Books in March 2027. Her book of linked stories, Lester Higata's 20th Century, won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction/John Simmons Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press. She also co-edited an anthology of poetry, Seriously Funny, with her husband David Kirby. She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow in poetry. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, and many other magazines. Her poem "Ode to Words for Parties (American Edition)" was included in the anthology A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker 1925-2025.
