Son of a Sierra Leonean father and a Togolese mother, Kofi Awoonor was born in the Gold Coast on 13 March 1935. He was educated in Ghanaian schools, including Achimota College and the Institute of African Studies, before proceeding to the University of London, England, where he achieved his MA in 1968. He returned to Ghana to edit the very influential literary journal, Okyeame, encouraging several young Africans by publishing their works. Awoonor eventually emigrated to the United States where he became chairman of the comparative literature programme at the Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York (SUNY). A prolific writer himself he produced numerous poems, some of which appeared in Rediscovery and Other Poems (1964); the New Sum of Poetry from the Negro World (1966); Messages: Poems from Ghana (1970); Night of My Blood (1971); Elegy for the Revolution (1978), The House by the Sea (1978); A Harvest of Our Dreams (1984) and Ancestral Logic and Caribbean Blues (1993). Awoonor also wrote an important play; Ancestral Power (1970) and two novels, This Earth, My Brother (1971) and Comes the Voyager at Last (1992). In 1975 he published The Breast if the Earth: A Study of the Cultures and Literatures of Africa. His writings mainly deal with the sad state of Africa in the twentieth century as a result of European imperialism and African corruption. He served for some years as Ford Foundation Writer-in-Residence at Columbia University, producer and host of the African Heritage television series and as president of the African Literature Association.
AWOONOR, Kofi
