Poet Okwudili Nebeolisa Wins Prairie Lights Fiction Contest

Otosirieze, a writer, culture journalist, curator, and media consultant, is the founder and editor of Open Country Mag. For the magazine, he has written longform features and Profiles of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rita Dominic, and Cardinal Arinze; curates The Next Generation, a series of special issues highlighting rising literary voices; co-conceptualized Nigeria’s first formal bestseller list, with bookstore Rovingheights; and runs a Curatorial Fellowship, funded by Africa No Filter, mentoring creatives in art, fashion, music, and media. He was editor of Folio Nigeria, then CNN’s exclusive media affiliate in Africa, before its relaunch on Open Country Mag, and was briefly Business/Creative Head of its planned portfolio company Folio Digital Media. There, he wrote over a hundred pieces on the Nigerian culture scene, covering innovation in over 20 fields, including film, art, music, tech, sports, cuisine, fashion, journalism, sculpture, beauty, health, and activism. He was chair of The Gerald Kraak Prize, a South African initiative for storytelling about gender, sexuality, and social justice, and edited its fourth anthology The Beautyful Ones Have Just Been Born. He was a judge for The Morland Scholarship, a British grant for African writers. He has led or joined editorial teams at a host of platforms and projects in African literature, including at 14, the pioneering LGBTQ collective. His fiction has appeared in The Threepenny Review and Transition. He has given guest lectures at Dartmouth College and at Grinnell College. He has an MA in African Studies and a BA in English/History from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was Adjunct Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. He taught English at Godfrey Okoye University, Enugu. In 2019, he received the inaugural The Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature. In 2020, he was named among “The 100 Most Influential Young Nigerians” by Avance Media. He has appeared on With Chude's list of "The 150 Most Interesting Nigerians in Culture." Twitter & Instagram: @otosirieze. Website: otosirieze.com.