At Pomona there was a robust international presence. I arrived in Cambridge after attending Pomona College in Claremont, California. Words carried their own internal dignity they came with an unobstructed natural grace, and the rule seems to have been: If you cannot speak well, then do not speak. There was song in the air, song to accompany all kinds of ceremony, both public and private. The village knows a thing or two about the ceremonies of traditional leadership, the obduracy of ritual in the settled lives of peoples. I was born in Onitsha, Nigeria, in the Umuezearoli Village of old Onitsha on the banks of the Niger River. I have lived in the Boston area since 1969. Whether one’s focus is fiction or nonfiction, poetry or the spoken word, there is plenty to keep one occupied in the greater Boston metropolitan area. One reason is the sheer number of young people who come to attend the area’s colleges and universities, many of them staying on after graduation, either to attend graduate school, or to settle down and try their hands at a literary career. In Boston within the literary clientele there is a robust mix-the old and the young, the settled and the itinerant, the native born and the foreign born-all of them searching for wisdom, inspiration, or comfort in the written word or searching for entertainment in those venues where literary performance takes off with comedic zeal.

The city of Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists has produced many prominent writers in its past, but it is also a city whose literary history is still in the making. He is the owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the nation’s oldest poetry bookstore.īoston is an old city and it is also a young city. He is a professor of philosophy at Wellesley College, and author of the poetry collections Before a Common Soil (Ilora Press, 2007) and Of Altair, the Bright Light (Earthwinds Editions, 2005).

Ifeanyi Menkiti was born in Onitsha, Nigeria.

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