Open Country Mag is exclusively revealing the cover of Exodus by Tolu Daniel, his debut essay collection forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in March 2027.
A synopsis:
Exodus is an intimate essay collection exploring memory, migration, grief, and home. Blending memoir, cultural criticism, political witnessing, and lyrical reportage, the book documents the emotional and psychological realities of contemporary African migration.
Moving between Abeokuta, Kansas, and St. Louis, these essays revisit childhood fables, family tragedies, nationalist dreams, the aftermath of the EndSARS protests, and the disorientations of diasporic life.
Daniel, who was guest curator for our fifth annual 60 Notable Books of the Year, began writing the collection after leaving Nigeria, initially as a way of making sense of the mass emigration that came to be known as “Japa” and of his own experience of leaving home.
“At first, the language eluded me — partly because I was still negotiating my own multiple positionalities within that idea of leaving home,” he told Open Country Mag.
The project began to take shape as Daniel encountered people whose decisions to leave Nigeria were shaped by different circumstances, including those whose departures were connected to the EndSARS protests.
“Their stories gave shape to what I had been circling,” he said, “and suddenly the essays had somewhere to go—essays that are at once about leaving and about the complications of that leaving: the encounters with grief, the disorientations of arrival, the quiet reckonings that follow.”
The cover artist Addison B. Conn describes the image as an attempt to embody “a converging black gaze; one that searches for the horizon as we all move forward in time.”
Daniel mentioned that the collage became an immediate visual reflection of the book’s central preoccupation: “the fragmented, layered, and ever-shifting experience of migration.” At its centre is the suggestion of a face, an eye emerging from a dark, textured form that appears to assemble itself from shards of stone, leaves, and shadow. “It evokes the migrant as a collage, never a singular, coherent whole, but a composition of many parts, some inherited, some chosen, some imposed.”
Early readers have praised the collection. Romeo Oriogun, author of Nomad and The Gathering of Bastards, called it a chronicle of “a generation that began with the hopes of democracy and now inhabits the vast dispersal of migration.” Emmanuel Iduma, author of I Am Still with You, said it is “a wondrous testimony of life itself” and “a remarkable achievement from a writer who has found his mature voice.”
Tolu Daniel is the recipient of the 2025 Isele Nonfiction Prize for his essay “Notes of a Nonresident Alien” and a Heartland Journalism Fellowship 2025–27. His work has also been supported by Monson Arts, Writivism, and the Goethe-Institut Nigeria. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where he is completing a PhD in Comparative Literature.