As we hit the halfway mark on 2025 our treat this week is a thought-provoking conversation with Wana Udobang, a multifaceted writer, poet, performer, curator, and storyteller based in Lagos, Nigeria. I met Wana last year during the Pa Gya! Literary Festival in Accra where she faciliated her own unique writing workshop - “Comfort Food” a storytelling and poetry workshop that uses food as a conduit to explore memories, history, joy, and healing which was born out of her culinary quality time during the pandemic. In this lively conversation we cover Wana's extensive body of work which encompasses her journey of becoming a creative professional in Nigeria, her spoken word albums and how she has honed her craft building a framework for entrepreneurship using various storytelling platforms.

00:00:23 Introduction and Opening Remarks
00:04:02 A Short Story About ECG
00:07:56 Introduction and Background
00:11:53 Wana's Creative Journey and Achievements
00:16:00 Life in Lagos and Cultural Insights
00:19:42 The Art of Storytelling and Poetry
00:23:38 Why the Where: Career Path and Returning to Nigeria
00:27:32 Comfort Food Workshops and Creative Collaborations
00:31:43 Glocal Speak
00:35:31 Organizing for Success: Tools and Techniques
00:39:27 Balancing Creativity and Economics
00:43:22 Mindset Hacks as an Ethos
00:47:30 The Role of Fellowships in Professional Growth
00:51:20 What's New and Next?
00:55:15 Reader, Watcher, Listener?
00:59:25 Final Thoughts

Where to find Wana?
wanaudobang.com
On LinkedIn
On Instagram
On YouTube

What’s Wana reading?
Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by Sarah Lipado Manyika
All Fours by Miranda July
The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks

What’s Wana watching?
Conclave
The Substance

What’s Wana listening to?
Florence and the Machine

Other topics of interest:
About the Ibibio people of Nigeria
Def Poetry Jam
About Nnedi Okorafor and Akata Warrior as seen in the new Forever series on Netflix

Special Guest: Wana Udobang.

Click the and check out Vamba’s Pa Gya! session centering his latest book The Emperor's Son.

Where to find Vamba?
On LinkedIn
On Instagram
On Facebook
On X

Vamba’s essential Pan-African activism reading list:
[The Radience of the King)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Radiance_of_the_King) by Camara Laye and excerpt to the introduction by Toni Morrison

Other topics of interest:
Who was Samori Touré?
Kolahun, Liberia
Liberia’s First Civil War
About Edward Wilmot Blyden, father of Pan-Africanism
About the Gulf War
Senegalese filmmaker, Ousmane Sembène
About Groningen
Why lekker is so sweet…
The Comet by W.E.B Dubois

The first Tuesday in November represents the official US election day. As polling evolves for higher participation and greater inclusion, most states offer early voting so millions have already cast thier votes. Throughout this year of elections across the globe, the build up to the two where I have a say, the United States and Ghana, has played a critical role in inspiring my most activist self to move the dial in different ways toward manifesting a new world. Coincidentally, this week on the podcast kicks off our Writing as Activism series in coordination with the Pa Gya! Literary Festival in Accra. Recorded live at the eighth installment of the festivaland in the days that followed, starting the panel, Writing as Activism: Ghanaian Voices and Pan-African Perspectives Across Genres, the conversation starts with a distinguished voices covering works of poetry, screenwriting, and nonfiction scholarship with:

Nicole Amarteifio is an acclaimed Ghanaian-American TV/film writer, director, and producer. She successfully launched the hit web series 'An African City’ - dubbed by CNN and the BBC as Africa’s answer to ‘Sex and the City’.

Returning Glocal Citizen, Nydia A. Swaby is a Black feminist artist, researcher and curator. Her practice engages archives, autoethnography, photography, the moving image, and the imagination to explore the gendered, diasporic and affective dimensions of Black being and becoming. In addition to curating artistic programmes, she creates visual narratives, research and performance texts. Nydia's first book, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives, was published by Lawrence Wishart in October 2024 as part of LW's Radical Black Women book series. She is also developing an artist film, Amy and Me in the Archive, which will be screened at the forthcoming Singapore International Photography Festival 2024.

And Poet Laureate of Jamaica, Kwame Dawes, author of numerous books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent collection is Sturge Town (Peepal Tree Press, UK 2023). Dawes is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. He teaches in the Pacific MFA Program and is the Series Editor of the African Poetry Book Series, Director of the African Poetry Book Fund, and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Kwame Dawes is the winner of the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2022 Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the Government of Jamaica. He is the Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2024-2027).

Click through to find out more about the Pa Gya! Literary Festival and the Writer’s Project Ghana and watch this and other festival panels at WPGTV.

Where to find Nicole?
On LinkedIn
On Instagram
On Facebook
On YouTube
On X

Where to find Kwame?
On LinkedIn
On Instagram
On X
On Facebook

Where to find Nydia?
On Glocal Citizens
On LinkedIn
On Instagram
On X

Other topics of interest and the Essential Pan-African Activism reading list coming soon!

*This audio recording has been edited for clarity from the original video recording.

Special Guests: Kwame Dawes, Nicole Amarteifio, and Nydia Swaby.

This week on the podcast, rather than one last guest rounding out our March 2023 herstories series, I went into our archives with a specific goal of putting together a salon of sorts about craft. I think of craft as how vocation, location, persistence and passion fulfill us. According to Merriam-Webster, it is skill in planning, making, or executing.

I always ask this question because I feel it allows my guest to share more than what they do on a day-to-day basis for economic returns i.e. work, and gets closer to the heart of who they are and how they go about manifesting a new world. So, this week we’re re-visiting with:

• Jamaican-American, Nydia Swaby a Black feminist researcher, writer, and curator based in London about Archives, Art and Freedom Dreams;

• Filipino-Jamaican-American, Zee Clarke an author, mindfulness practitioner and racial healing professional about Healing in Breathing;

• Ghanaian-Afro-German, Ekua Yankah a thought leader in international development on being a Polyglot, Professor, Policy Advisor and Art Patron;

• Ghanaian-Brit, Esther Armah an author, journalist and entrepreneur on storytelling for structural change;

• Nigerian, Sarah Adeyinka a humanitarian researcher and author on Humanitarian CoCreating; and

• and Detroit Native, Dereca Blackmon an inclusion innovator, speaker and spiritual activist about Uncommon Conversations.

Be sure to check out full episodes using the links above, there’s a wealth of valuable, craft-inspired insights from each of these audacious women!

Special Guests: Dereca Blackmon, Ekua Yankah, Esther Armah, Nydia Swaby, Sarah Adeyinka, and Zhalisa "Zee" Clarke.

In her creative approach to knowledge production, she uses archives, ethnography, photography, film, and the imagination to curate programs and visual narratives, write essays and performance pieces exploring the gendered and diasporic dimensions of Black being and becoming. She also creates ancestral altars using family pictures and memorabilia, found photographs and archival images, West African textiles and wood carvings, crystals, fossils, stones, shells, and other curios. These practices converge in her forthcoming monograph, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Back Feminist Archives (Lawrence Wishart, Summer 2022) and Caird Research Fellowship at The National Maritime Museum, ‘Curating Archives of Affect: Black Feminist Pasts, Presents, and Futures’ (December 2021 - September 2020), and my ongoing visual series, ‘Becoming with Archive: Blackness, Gender, Diaspora’ (2010 - Present).

Alongside her practice-based research, Nydia work as the Curator of Learning at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where she collaborates with academics, curators, artists, and writers to develop a multi-disciplinary, practice-based research and learning program. She is also a member of Feminist Review’s Editorial Collective and the Curator of Programmes, and co-edited a recent issue on queer, feminist, diasporic, and decolonial archives.

Please read on and explore the topics of interest below for a thoughtfully curated account of the many individuals discussed in the episode.

Where to find Nydia?
www.nydiaswaby.com
On LinkedIn

What's Nydia reading?
The Sex Lives of African Women by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick

What's Nydia watching?
Master
Daughters of the Dust

Other topics of interest:
Amy Ashwood Garvey
Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
Pan African Movement
Garveyism
Jamaica Kincaid
On Code Switching
Double Consciousness
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Ifeanyi Awachie
Imani Perry
Lorraine Hansberry
Barby Asante
S. Pearl Sharp
Akosua Adoma Owusu
Rita Gayle
Joan Morgan
Brittney Cooper
The Politics of Pleasure

Special Guest: Nydia Swaby.