Élékéré Press today unveils, exclusively via Open Country Mag, the cover of Mismemories: Contemporary Writing from Queer West African Voices, a new anthology edited by Nelson CJ and Edwin Okolo and forthcoming on 28 November 2026.
A synopsis:
Bringing together writing and visual art from across West Africa, Mismemories turns its attention to the intimate realities of queer life: love, desire, ambition, class, family, grief, memory, and the ordinary negotiations of living within societies in which queerness is often pushed from public view.
A getaway to a seaside town in Senegal alters the relationship between two men in love. A drive through the streets of Accra heightens the tension between two women navigating a fresh wound. Elsewhere, a bungalow that once housed an unlikely family of queer artists is reduced to ashes.
Across these stories and works, Mismemories documents lives that are at once distinctly queer and unmistakably West African, without reducing either identity to a single experience.
Mismemories is Élékéré Press’s first acquisition and follows the launch of the press’s inaugural short story prize. The anthology is curated by A Third Space in partnership with CHEVS, and brings together contributors from Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and elsewhere across the region.
“I have rarely encountered a collection so rich in both beauty and desire, expressed in such a compelling way,” said Nnaemeka Nnam, co-founder of Élékéré Press. “It is a dream to publish a body of work that shifts the narratives around everyday life in West Africa, and to do so across so many forms of art — photography, stories, essays and poetry.”
Nelson CJ, co-editor of the anthology, said: “Mismemories was born out of an inquiry into the varied ways that otherness manifests in different parts of West Africa, a region shaped by distinct cultural and socio-economic realities. The stories we have been reading and putting together do not comprehensively tell us what queerness looks like across West Africa, but they make bold attempts to.”
The cover of Mismemories features original artwork by the Sierra Leonean artist Ngadi Smart. Smart draws on an object familiar from many West African childhoods: decorative figurines kept in family living rooms, treasured by parents and placed beyond the reach of children.
“This cover was inspired by a symbol we often saw in our African parents’ living rooms growing up,” Smart said. “I remember reaching for those as a child and being told they were precious artefacts, not to be touched, and that they were to stay intact for our guests to view and appreciate. The same-sex embracing figurines on the cover are a slight nod to this West African childhood experience and memory, and are depicted as an act of defiance by the sculptor.”
The image transforms that familiar domestic object into something more intimate: two figures of the same sex locked in an embrace. In doing so, the cover reflects one of the anthology’s central concerns — the ways queer lives exist within, inherit from, challenge and remake the cultures and memories that surround them.
For co-editor Edwin Okolo, the anthology also captures the breadth of contemporary African literary experimentation. “This anthology has afforded me the opportunity to experience the diverse storytelling traditions across Africa and the cultures that inform them,” Okolo said. “It is exciting to see so many young African writers ambitiously experimenting with form, interrogating how queerness is experienced in the region, and writing into existence futures shaped by tenderness and possibility.”
Mismemories: Contemporary Writing from Queer West African Voices, edited by Nelson CJ and Edwin Okolo, will be published by Élékéré Press on 28 November 2026.
Purchase Mismemories
The anthology is available for pre-order:
- Élékéré Press, for at ₦10,000
- Selar
The book is also available via Open Country Mag‘s affiliate link on Amazon:
Élékéré is the Igbo word for the hour hand of a clock.
Élékéré Press is an independent publisher of daring and imaginative work by African writers on the continent and across the diaspora. Its list is rooted in lived experience and drawn to work that is tender, disruptive, experimental, or resistant to easy categorisation. Publishing across literary fiction, intimate and erotic writing, feminist work and experimental forms, Élékéré Press is built on a simple conviction: important stories should not have to wait for permission — or for the world to decide that their time has come.
More Book Announcements & Cover Reveals
— Cover Reveal: Tolu Daniel’s Exodus, His Debut Essay Collection (Exclusive)
— Ekosimba: Full Details of the First Contemporary Anthology from DR Congo (Exclusive)
— Cover Reveal: Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s Birth of Orisha, the First Novel in His Orisha Cycle Trilogy (Exclusive)
