Professor Nduka Otiono, who holds a cross appointment in English and African Studies, has several new publications coming out this year. His short story collection, The Night Hides With a Knife, originally published in 1995, will be issued this month in a silver anniversary edition by New Horn Press (in conjunction with Mace Associates Limited), featuring a new cover designed by Ifesinachi Nwadike and a new Afterword by author Frank Uche Mowah. Harry Garuba, poet and professor at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, wrote that the collection “takes us on an impressive, multi-textual journey of resourcefulness and creativity that combines the best of the oral and scribal in Nigeria literary culture: traditional storytelling strategies and conventional narrative forms are overlaced with a fragmentary, postmodern reflexivity; the voice propels the pen, only to get trapped in the tape recorder.” The Night That Hides With a Knife won the Association of Nigerian Authors’ Spectrum Prize in 1995. Professor Otiono also has an edited collection (with Chiji Okoma), Oral Literary Performace In Africa: Beyond Text, forthcoming in June 2021. His selected poems will be published in the Laurier Poetry Series as Displace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono in the fall of 2021.
