Biography
Titilope Sonuga is a Nigerian-Canadian poet, playwright and performer who has captured hearts across the globe. She is a leading voice in global literary communities, with work that dazzles from page to stage. Her poetry concert, Open, has shown to sold-out audiences in the UK, Canada, South Africa, and Nigeria. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Down to Earth (2011), Abscess (2014), and This Is How We Disappear (2019). Sonuga has released three spoken word albums, Mother Tongue (2011), Swim (2019) and Sis (2024).
A versatile creative force, Sonuga has scripted campaigns for Google, Intel, Samsung, UN Women, White Ribbon Alliance, and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She was an ambassador for Intel's She Will Connect, a program dedicated to empowering women and girls through technological literacy across Africa. Sonuga has written three plays: The Six (an intergenerational exploration of womanhood), Naked (a one-woman play) and Ada the Country (a musical). Sankofa, Sonuga's libretto, which reimagines Igor Stravinski's Opera, L'histoire du Soldat, will premiere in Toronto, Canada, in the fall of 2024. Sonuga made history as the first poet to perform at a Nigerian presidential inauguration and was the 9th Poet Laureate of the City of Edmonton, where she currently resides.
Micro-interview
I read lots of poetry in high school. Because of the kind of poetry we read, I thought that all poetry was inaccessible, difficult to decode, a language far out of my reach, until I encountered Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. It is a poem/play/epic that broke my world wide open and I fell in love with writing in a way that changed my life.
I have always written. Songs, stories, poems. My earliest memory of storytelling is as a young girl, maybe 8 years old. I didn't begin to consider myself a poet until years later, the first time I read something I had written out loud and saw and felt the way it was responded to. I was 20.
A poet's job is to give meaning to the world. To reflect the times. To remind us how we lived and loved. To make room for pain and suffering but also for hope and healing.
"I Am" is one of the first poems I wrote and read out loud. It is a poem that was born out of a desire to affirm the things I knew to be true about myself, in a world that tried to tell me otherwise. It is a celebration.
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